No Escape

WINTER MEETING--Ethel Vance--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Stacy was a born fixer. When Lieut. "Slick" Novak, submarine commander and U.S. Hero No. 1, came to Manhattan on leave, Stacy fixed a little dinner party. He sat Slick next to full-blown Peggy Markham. Just to make it look like a foursome, Stacy also invited Poetess Susan Grieve, who was unpoetically cold and prim. Stacy ordered lots of drinks, and soon Slick and Peggy were giving each other appraising glances in the manner of "two cobras raising their heads from the grass." Stacy hastily whistled up a taxi for them. Then, suddenly, everything misfired; poor Stacy found himself deep in the heart of Brooklyn with speechlessly angry Peggy, and prim Susan found herself in the arms of the U.S. Navy.

Susan and Slick are the chief characters in Ethel Vance's new novel. In two previous novels, Escape (TIME, Sept. 25, 1939) and Reprisal (TIME, Nov. 16, 1942), Author Vance, who under her real name (Grace Zaring Stone) also wrote The Bitter Tea of General Yen, has used her talent for melodrama to best-selling effect. .But Winter Meeting is quite a different kind of book--a brief, sharp study of the way in which lives may be turned upside down in the twinkling of an eye.

Gibbering Unknowns. At first, Susan and Slick "smiled at each other but without warmth, rather as though they had just bumped into each other on a sidewalk." But there was no escape. So for the first time ever, Susan told somebody her life story. It was quite a tale. Her mother, she told Slick, had first drunk herself into a stupor with creme de cacao and curac,ao, then ran away with a traveling salesman. Thereupon her father began to lose his wits, finally cut his throat with a razor. Her grandfather was popped into a sanatorium for alcoholics; her uncle still languished in the state penitentiary. The relatives who raised Susan were "a whole gibbering pack of unknowns, all drunken, all semi-criminal, all diseased." Prudish Susan was so overcome by the "beautiful luxury of grief" in telling this hideous tale that she burst into tears. Slick only poured more molasses on his flapjacks. But, in the middle of the night, he suddenly turned to Susan and said: "I must tell you something. All my life I've wanted to be a priest."

By the time Slick has rejoined his boat, Author Vance has put the harried lovers over most of the worst jumps of mutual torment, misery and self-sacrifice. Once in a while dolor is relieved by snaps of humor and gay observations about human types, but all in all it is chiefly a must for those who love a good cry.

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