Day of Squalls

I AM MARY DUNNE by Brian Moore. 217 pages. Viking. $4.95.

What is least important about this small, fierce novel is that it is a brilliant stunt--a male author staying undetected, for the length of a book, in the mind of a female main character. Brian Moore does not pull off his wig and bow, nor is there any impulse to applaud. Applause, of course, would mean that the deception had failed. It is, in fact, successful, and Moore earns, with great cleverness, a distinction that many writers are born with--that of being judged as a lady novelist.

But attaining the status of a Frances Parkinson Keyes does not ensure a good novel, however, and it is an achievement quite apart from female impersonation that Moore's novel is excellent. It is a psychological study of one day in the life of Mary Dunne, a pretty woman of 33, married more or less happily to her third husband, a successful playwright. Dunne's day is a series of emotional squalls, between which she ducks in and out of recollected doorways.

She learns that her mother may have cancer. She has lunch with a bitchy girl friend from Montreal who tells her that one of her former husbands is a suicide. She and her present husband make love enjoyably (it is a fine touch that Mary thinks of men in dim and stereotyped terms, as if seen by a self-obsessed woman).

The day ends; the book ends. There is no resolution. Was there a crisis? There is, at any rate, a life, and Novelist Moore has caught the reader in its snarls. This is very near the center of what novel-writing is about.

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