GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT

"It can be sad, the sun in the afternoon"—the afternoon of a woman of forty-odd who is one of those perpetual transients, living, or really half-living, in London or Paris, shifting from the uneasy retreat to the uncertain possibility, moving from shabby hotel rooms to second class cafes—a Cinzano here, a fine there. Memories (of a scruffy cat she chased to its death; of the too quiet baby she had alone who died) collect like fluffs of dust under the bed; but there are alternatives—she might dye her hair or kill herself, next month. Now, returning to the Paris she once had known under no really happier circumstances, she has random encounters—with one or two Russian emigres, with the man with the lustful eyes she avoids in the hotel, with her "gigolo," a young man escaped from the Foreign Legion who gives her a night of love—hardly—and takes her for a thousand francs. . . . Miss Rhys has always attracted a certain minor cult in England; this mono-montage, originally written in 1939, is to a degree reminiscent of Voyage in the Dark (republished here in 1968) hut it is a much stronger book. Not a word seems out of place although transposed to a time which has seen so many other changes. Perhaps because Jean Rhys is both a supple and fastidious writer who can thread momentary but timeless recognitions through the eye of a needle, however dim the margins of experience with which she deals. Flawlessly.