THE FORTUNES OF LAURIE BREAUX

Misfortunes"" might have more accurately gauged the content of this strange first novel, for, in the course of a career of a Southern belle who went off the track, Laurie never seems to find love either pure or simple. The man she married was not the man she loved; the man she loved- and the father of her child- became a ""basket case"" in World War II; New York offered her a succession of nightmarish affaires; and she wound up with a dead and true love for a full-blooded Indian who wanted no part of the enclosures marriage might have afforded. He simply ""wanted out"". The story ends with her child's question: ""Well Mother, what now?"" She has come full circle back to the South she thought to have escaped. There are some bypaths in the course of the telling-some glimpses of a decadent New York so-called artistic society -- even a brief venture into anthropological research among the primitives -- but none of it adds up to any discernible direction. A book for the curious rather than the perceptive.