LILLIAN WHITE DEER

Lillian White Deer, it turns out, is not an Indian. She is a ceramist and an independent woman, who marries Richard, the dashing brother of the scholarly narrator, Robert. Robert's jealous, club-woman wife breaks up the marriage, and Robert runs off to live with Lillian in a town resembling Aspen, Colorado. It is a somewhat disjointed story, filled with quotations from Robert's book and from a cultural meeting in the town; and the side-plot of the town's development never quite works as a counterpoint to the break-up of human relations. Yet it is a literate, pleasant, civilized book, and the characters are interesting, if not entirely clear. Robert apparently represents intellectual man, both dependent upon and doomed by civilization; Lillian, a rather ambivalent force of nature, who goes back to Richard while Robert fades back into the academic fold. The story, though pleasantly told, lacks real dramatic tension; its nd however dramatically framed in an auto race and crack up, is inevitable and melancholy.