Book Notes

OUT ON ANY LIMB--John Myers Myers--Dutton ($2.50).

A new and (except for the cleft-palate title) equally expert historical novel by the author of last year's best-selling The Harp and the Blade Hero Ingram Applegarth, an Elizabethan gentleman-adventurer, is 21, short, not good-looking, full of adolescent illusions about himself, intelligent and endearing. The brisk plot recounts his efforts to restore to beautiful Marian Barking her stolen estates. Author Myers' women are somewhat featureless, his male characters agreeably vital--in particular, one Tom the Crowder, a malefactor with more entertainment value than Ulysses' sirens, and much less conscience. Author Myers' period painting is unobtrusive, his humor humorous. Occasional references to carnal pursuits give a discreet impression of Elizabethan lust.

THE FABULOUS PEOPLE--Robert Norman Hubner--Knopf ($2.50).

A first novel by a former U.S. reporter in Japan about reporters, small-time samurai, international traders in pre-Pearl Harbor Tokyo. The story: an American newspaper man and a beautiful little Japanese girl cannot marry because the girl's father says no. Arbitrarily attached to this framework, like seaweed to an empty oyster shell, are some filamental anecdotes about Japanese officialdom and Tokyo's foreign colony. The characterization is stiff, the local color dim. This is that book all newspaper men are going to write instead of hanging around in bars. It might have been a better book if the author had hung around in more bars.

THE SEAGULL CRY--Robert Nathan --Knopf ($2).

Robert Nathan's last novel, They Went On Together, dealt with refugees being machine-gunned in one of those nameless countries which are Novelist Nathan's today's special. The Sea-Gull Cry is less portentous. A blonde young Polish countess is living in an abandoned scow on Cape Cod. A timid, tender, middle-aged professor visits her. After an infinitesimal tiff, they fall in love. That, except for a pair of pleasant children and a brace of pungent New Englanders, is all. The thousands of Nathan readers will find The Sea-Gull Cry pleasant summer reading. Others may be reminded of those hairdressers' exhibits where decollete women with complete sets of sculptured curls smile forever in a windless world.

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