THE DIVINE TENEMENT

A first novel, this doesn't get too far, and presents in caricatural comedy Mike Mooney's bar on Third Avenue, its habitues, and its discoverer, Clarissa Yearling, a middlewesterner's spoiled darling now idling away time at the Art Students League. Clarises sets up her easel at Mike Mooney's, makes it her Montmartre, participates in neighborhood activities much of which concerns the purchase of an old house by the eccentric Noble Clay and Mark Wending, its elaborate reconversion into a ""divine tenement"", and the end of that project with a free for all open house...Humor which is largely exaggeration and only minimally entertaining.