THE MIXED BLESSING

A size-38 woman's novel which seems even bigger, particularly when you're only midway and read a line like ""everything in me reaches out to you in an agony of longing."" This is Mrs. Van Slyke's fourth. She's sort of a lesser Laura Hobson effusively tilting at prejudice (cf., All Visitors Must Be Announced, 1972) while making sweet use of it (her characters are Negroes). This one's about Tony, child of Charlene, white, and Jim, black, who's made it in the white world. Toni falls in love with her first cousin Alan but the problem is that his mother has not spoken to her sister Charlene since she married Jim. The thought of Toni and Alan's (mes)alliance drives her to suicide. Toni gives him up bravely and marries another, not so bravely conceals the truth, worries over the child to be born until it turns out a lovely ""pink and white,"" but when her husband hears elsewhere that she's ""mixed,"" he becomes impotent. That leaves her free for Alan. . . . Should this pass?