Woman's Men

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS--William Maxwell--Harper ($2.50).

Says one of the characters in They Came Like Swallows: "Each of us has his private nightmare." Elizabeth was the one who soothed her family's bad dreams.

James was her husband; his sleep was sound as long as she was there beside him. Her 13-year-old son Robert had lost a leg when he was a little boy; it was easy to imagine, though impossible to tell by watching him, what he dreamed about.

Bunny was 8, and puny; he could not or would not stick up for himself, and every day brought him tragedy. Bunny's nightmare was simply his mother's absence.

Around this simple human situation Author Maxwell has written his second novel, a story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic, will melt many a common reader to tears.

Elizabeth was going to have another baby. Robert knew enough about it to be embarrassed; when the news was broken to Bunny, he was simply hostile to the idea, wanted his mother to think better of it. Because Elizabeth had had a hard time when the other children were born, she was to go away to a hospital in a neighboring city. It was the winter of 1918, when the flu epidemic was ravaging the country. Bunny was the first to come down with it. After his recovery, he and Robert were packed off to an aunt's while his mother and father went off to the hospital. Then Robert got the flu. Long before his father came back alone from the hospital, Robert guessed the worst. Both James and Robert blamed themselves, in silence, for Elizabeth's death. James thought he could not face living with his children, planned to sell the house, get rid of everything that could possibly remind him of his dead wife. Then he saw frightened little Bunny staring at him with Elizabeth's eyes.

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