THE GOLDEN SPUR

This writer's return to her established habitat (Greenwich Village- not so much beat as tired) is not a comeback and although her readers will recognize all the old familiar haunts from the Brevoort and Chumley's to the White Horse, they will not find them very lively. Jonathan Jaimison, an innocent from Ohio, comes there in search of his real father the unknown man in his now dead mother's life whom she used to meet at The Golden Spur. This attempt to fill in his and her past provides a then and now portrait of scuffed up intellectuals and aesthetes; of obsolescent, out-of-work writers, of ""free-loaders on genius"" (a predatory gallery woman) and ""other people's broken hearts"" (two vagrant young women), etc., etc. But there are some sunny surprises: Jonathan inherits a sizeable sum and finds a girl, and in the repercussions of his quest for his paternity, he is responsible for some other providential twists of fate and fortune.... Still- it's not enough the once withering touch now just seems faded.