WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS

A soundtrack on a new lost generation grooved in a conformity which still will not bring security follows Bud Floyd through his protest against his self-made father, to an Ivy League schooling in the East, and finally to the organization-man type life of Crystal Rock, in the midwest. Turning down the big business his father had offered him, Bud joins with Alec, a dilettante-demigod with a careless charm, in a foolish magazine venture in New York- where he meets Debbie, a girl of spirit. Marriage to Debbie takes them to Crystal Rock and the job with Monarch handpicked by her father as well as the suburban stereotype of the shopping center and the golfcourse. Debbie knows only an increasing discontent with ""dullness mating with boredom"", with Bud, and finally a weekend which brings Alec back into their lives shows up- not Alec's enduring potency- but Bud's weakness- and makes possible a new start..... Otis Carney, who owes more to Fitzgerald than to Marquand, has a reliable eye and ear which gives his novel an insistent authenticy. A popular possibility and to be backed.