THE WAY WE WERE

This is another one of those love stories about irreconcilables the way it was during and after World War II. It's Arthur Laurents' first novel although you'll remember him as the playwright (Time of the Cuckoo) and scenarist and the backgrounds, New York and Hollywood, seem just right because they probably are although the story in spots could have used another conference or two. Or perhaps it's just because the differences on which it's based get to be the same after a while. But you'll like Katie, nee Morosky, who looked as if she should be picketing NYU even when she was at Bennington and was head of the YCL and had ambitions to be ""a Marxist-oriented Jane Austen."" And Hubbell Gardiner for whom everything was too easy except loving Katie and who becomes her ""class struggle"" although she's never secure; there are all those other girls with long legs and without frizzy hair who better match his ""Gentile gentility."" She's too committed and he doesn't want to be ""challenged"" (goaded), but they do get married and go to the Coast after he's written one good novel and one bad one at the time of the Hollywood witchhunt when there finally doesn't seem any question of who's to be purged. There are funny lines and sad scenes and most of all there's Katie who bruises as easily as she bristles. She makes it matter. Momentarily.