GREEN HOLLY

A rather slight story an affair from its reluctant beginning to its unsuspected conclusion, moves against a background of casual elegance (New York), keeps its tone personal but not too private. Joan Fell, unattached at 32, is in the words of the analyst she consults once a ""laving gul"" but there is nothing in her experience which would substantiate this a few, shallow young men in the past; an uneasy, evasive relationship with her only old friend, Phoebe. Through Phoebe, she meets- at a dinner party-Walter Asch, a middle-aged man from a very different background and he seems a very unlikely figure to attract her or occupy her thoughts. Alien as he seems (in his Homburg and rubbers), still he has a forthright authority which quickly shatters the illusions of her self-sufficient, equivocal existence. For the first time she finds herself in love, even though the attachment has many liabilities: Walter has a schizophrenic wife and Belinda, a child with many problems and no charm. It is, during a summer away at camp, and the accidental (?) tragedy which overtakes the hapless Belinda, that Jean, whose first love has also taught her to be afraid, has now every reason to question the permanence of what has been at best precarious and inevitably perishable.... Miss Kaufman writes with precise perception as well as a sophisticated eye for details which women will find attractive. It's a fastidious, finished entertainment.