THE EYE OF SUMMER

A second appearance confirms the sweet-sour talent of the first (The Lion House- Rinebart-1959) and the deceptively offhand dialogue which eventually bares a disturbed zone of destructive personal relationships. In three, rather sketchy, sequences here (the first appeared independently as a short story), the too close attachment of Spence and his cousin Connie, a year older, is exposed, while the continuum of summers spent together, in a beach community, strengthens their symbiotic affiliation which is almost a twin identity. With each other, they have an existence exclusive of the world (Connie has absentee parents; Upence's are casual). And from the childsplay of the earlier years, thin follows through to the summer (Connie is twenty; Spence is now writing his play) which finds them still ""clinging to the emotional mementoes"" of a time which no longer exists, a togetherness which is only isolating, vitiating... The derivation (even more Salingeresque than the first- in its youthful characters and troubled preoccupations) may also be the designation.