THE LIGHTS AROUND THE SHORE

A strange story from the author of I Can Get It For You Wholesale, for this is as deliberately sympathetic a story as the others were deliberately unsympathetic. He does it with less assurance -- in a story of a trip abroad in the Summer of 1939, when a lad is exposed for the first time to betrayal and humiliation in an adult world. Peter has, presumably, been taken abroad by his Hungarian-born young aunt, Fini, to visit his grandparents. Actually, she has another objective -- the finding of a refugee she had met in Paris six years before, and was returning to marry. Peter recognises him as a rotter -- and his trust in his aunt dissolves, as he sees her degradation. At the close, returning to America to die, she confesses her mistake and regains his faith.