THE STEPS OF THE SUN

Miss Davis' second novel follows the design of her first -- The Last of the Greeks -- and again she assembles a group of very assorted people, this time in Mexico, intelligently annotates them so that you would like to know them even better than you will. However once again she has failed to advance any particular story and those in search of one will become restive. There's Meredith whose husband has just died (cancer) who opens her home as a rather elegant pension; Gene, a non-writing writer and Campbell, his homosexual attendant; a young couple, one of whom wants a child her husband will be unable to give her; a lady with a couple of appetizing twins; a pair of Greek exiles, German refugees, and one Willard Barnes who now as William Morris gives up his role and fight as an activist peace leader. . . Miss Davis is an attractive writer, responsive to places and people and issues, all of which are scanned by a cultivated eye; one wishes that she had managed to convert them into something more than an interlude, an interval, which is all that her novel essentially is.