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THE HILL OF GLASS by Catherine Whitcombe Kirkus Star

THE HILL OF GLASS

By

Publisher: Random House

A suggestion here of Scott Fitzgerald, the early O'Hara, for a story which in its New York and suburban sophistication reflects the shifting standards of two generations, the disintegration of the world of two old ladies, Lucy and her friendly enemy-Emily, who- having lost their husbands, houses, servants, children, still cling to what little they have left. And in the deterioration of the marriages of their only daughters, Marianna and Laura, is reflected all the restlessness of an emptier era; Marianna, who had always loved Ford whom Laura had married, bored by the devotion of her husband- Henry; Henry, who during the war had fallen in love with another girl with whom he found what Marianna had never given him; Laura, once brittle, bright, and now a little shrill; Ford, who'd acquired an Eastern seaboard gloss easily lost when drunk and reverting to type and to the woman who'd kept him as an adolescent... Some nice touches here, and some softer ones, this projects the dissolution of values, the emergence of insecurities as they affect the old who lose face, the children who are the ultimate victims, in a treatment which is clever, disabused, absorbing.