THE UNCOMFORTABLE INN

The heroine of this book is a searching Jewish woman, who having left her over-civilized society husband, spends an agonizing season in Greenwich Village. Desperately short of money and burdened by an infant, she seeks shelter in a Bank Street house run by an eccentric whose life work it is to collect the miserable and helpless about her, give them shelter and foster their inadequacies. Sickened by the formlessness of her own life, appalled by the chaos of her asylum, the woman seeks refuge in an affair. When this, too, fails, she turns to her own resources, her literary insight and innate honesty, and returns stoically to her husband and their remote mountain home. A highly introspective book, which successfully conveys a mood of depression, but in which neither character nor situation rises above the dreariness of the predicament, this is a feminine half sister of Godot and as such should only appeal to those who take aesthetic delight in the anatomy of their own discomfort.