Caf

THE HAPPY ISLAND--Dawn Powell--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Manhattan cafe society provokes a lot of writing, most of it about as enduring as a cafe socialite's hangover. It appears often in gossip columns, sometimes on society pages, and occasionally in that vast, unstudied documentary record of contemporary social life which is being accumulated in the files of the divorce court at Reno, Nevada. Last week Dawn Powell tried to dignify cafe society's ephemeral and highly publicized doings in prose at once livelier and more durable, in a sharp, satirical, disorderly novel which is good reading all the way through, but best when cafe society passes clear out of its picture.

No cafe socialite herself, but a short, engaging, Ohio-born playwright and novelist who looks a little like Dorothy Parker, Dawn Powell has previously been best known as a caustic satirist of Manhattan's literary circles. The radio stars, playwrights, dilettantes, pansies, professional hangers-on and accomplished drinkers who figure in The Happy Island are not quite so convincing as the authors and publishers she dissected before--they drink too much, cut each others' throats too lightly, change wives too often, wisecrack too brilliantly, and get mixed up in such fantastic messes that they often seem closer to farce than to 52nd Street. But they are as grisly a crew of merrymakers as ever stayed up after curfew. Astute backbiters, arrogant neurotics, expert philanderers and just plain dopes, they are radiant with phony public gaiety, abject with private jealousy, self-pity and hangover broodings which they pass off as philosophy. Like the central character, Prudence Ely, who ran away from a small Ohio town, they come from hated farms, broken-down families, "but these parts were snapped off like admission coupons at the gates of the great city."

Prudence sings in a night club, is petite, blonde, malicious and loses her lovers to a beautiful nymphomaniac. This lovely creature makes venomously naive confessions of her treachery, slips out of the marriage traps Prudence sets for her, and dreams of some worthwhile work such as running a marshmallow shop. As a portrayer of malicious females, Author Powell is pretty good herself, does best with this portrait and one of a playwright's wife, a jolly exhibitionist who brags about everything from her unfaithful husband to her 7A shoes. The slight story tells how Prudence falls in love with a sardonic young dramatist from her home town, follows him back to his bachelor shack, where she trudges in her $40 slippers in his $40 house, trying vainly to live up to his idea of an honest woman. Before leaving him, she announces: "I want to put my real soul back in the Safe Deposit forever before it cracks. I can have ten times more fun with the paste one."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.