POSTSCRIPT TO WENDY

Despite publisher enthusiasm, this seems to us a fairly spurious thesis novel by the author of the successful You and Heredity (Stokes). In a PS to Wendy whom he had loved and who had killed herself ten years earlier, Jerry reviews those years, --the people they had known, the politics they practised, the war, the death of Roosevelt, his own writing, his dud marriage and more casual affaires until he meets Leta, a social worker, with her belligerent evasion of sex. Ultimately Leta overcomes her ""block""- rooted in her ignorance of an heredity which she fears might be Negro -- and Jerry is impelled to break his attachment to Wendy, his obsession with the cause of her death. In what is largely an assemblage of secondhand sentiment and semi-intellectual cliches, this works in almost everything,- homosexuality, the race problems, bohemia, frigidity, etc., and achieves nothing particularly conclusive.