Feast of Peanut Brittle

A TIME To BE BORN--Dawn Powell --Scribner ($2.75).

This latest of popular Novelist Powell's brittle, flashy novels turns the eternal triangle into a polygon in 334 pages. It is the story of cold, glittery Amanda, an ambitious historical novelist, and Julian, the cold, glittery millionaire publisher whom she lures to a marriage bed with no more than "her usual annoyance at the damage to her permanent." It is also the story of ever-maudlin Ken, a kind of tame Venus's-flytrap, whom Amanda keeps around less for biological than for decorative reasons. Ken might have gone on being a tame cat indefinitely but for a quiet little country mouse named Vicky ("I like furniture and houses all warm and used and kind"), who gobbled him up when Amanda was busy riding the crest.

Around these sleek contemporary figures, Novelist Powell groups a host of minor characters as bright and synthetic as a string of dime-store diamonds. Together they create an illusion of Manhattan high life a year or so before Pearl Harbor. "A sucker age," Novelist Powell calls it, "an age for any propaganda, any cause, any lie, any gadget." Gold-digging Amanda and Julian have but a single aim -- to keep themselves on top. They are interested in making money, but more in the power that money gives. Even sex, when it is not a means to an end, is hardly more than a canape. Good works -- Bundles for Brit ain, aid to Finland, homes for children refugees -- take a lot of time because the reward of generosity is favorable publicity. Thus life for Julian and Amanda is an intense jitter of methodical planning to do things which give them no real pleasure. Even their off-hours have to be rationed to the last minute: "SLEEP (for efficiency purposes) 7 hrs. 18 min. ; CONVERSA TION WITH STAFF (for good-will and esprit de corps purposes) 12 min.; TALK WITH BARBER OR MANICURIST (for purpose of man-in-the-street comments on affairs) 15 min.; JOKE with storekeeper (for aid to digestion) 3 min."

The secretaries, flunkies, ghostwriters inside the publisher's mansion, the throng of harpies and climbers beating on his door, all share Amanda and Julian's cold blooded social and financial ambitions in miniature ("I spent half an hour being nice to that Corrigan . . . I thought he was Pictures, and all the time he was just Little Theater"). Each would, if she could, ride "the world's debacle as if it was her own yacht," while saving the tears "for Finland and the photographers." They quickly gang up on their erstwhile idol, Amanda, when her infidelity brings her husband's powerful publishing machine into action against her.

Cracks and gags are Authoress Powell's specialty. This novel crackles with them. As social comment it is a feast of peanut brittle.

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