AY IN LATE SEPTEMBER

ac, a fairly successful writer who was blacklisted and fled to Europe during the '50's witchhunts, now returns to the scene of his dissolved marriage in Connecticut to claim the son he left behind and to rescue the new love of his life from her present husband. What follows in flashback is a number of portraits in disillusionment of Mac's former crowd. There is a doctor too absorbed in his career to notice that his wife is cracking-up and his daughter has been impregnated; an old radical whose best days were the old days; an academic con man who has made a virtue of his mediocrity; a ""liberal"" congressman who lives it up on his wife's money; and two post-post debs who never got over boarding school. It is this lot including his former wife which Mac presumably has spiritually left behind through analysis and other experiences. But not entirely: his language is their language (in fact all the characters in their better moments sound pretty much the same), his weaknesses are also theirs and he has fallen in love with the n man's wife, a nymphomaniac in her own right. She needs her understanding husband more than she needs an expatriate and his son, who has grown up to be a kleptomaniac, so Mac and the boy go to Spain together. A novel so full of moral judgments might present a main character less steeped in the muck himself but presumably it's just open season on spineless liberals. Merle Miller isn't taking too many chances either.