PROFESSOR DESCENDING

The Surprise Party Complex (1962, p. 1077) dealt with some youngsters who were out of kilter; here the vagrants are older, no wiser, and no better off and this charts the experiences of one Professor Hilary, out of a job and a wife, who comes to New York and falls in with some lovable deadbeats: Maud who is in and out of mental institutions; Hank, a drunk, and Veronica who has spent two years sleeping in parks and condemned buildings. Through Veronica he meets up with a whole crew of occupational and marital misfits, joins their AA-modeled Suicide Club, is hotly pursued by the police and his wife, and settles for this kind of permanent impermence... An idea doesn't quite make a book, but these offbeat, faintly off-color characters are handled with sympathy and a sporadic bonhomie. Unpretentious.