AREN'T YOU EVEN GONNA KISS ME GOOD-BY?

To indulge in some literary comparison shopping, this is another one in the annual crop of first oats as sown by a seventeen Year old swinger. While Just as bald and/or ribald as Here We Go. Round The MuLberry Bush (Hunter Davies- Little, Brown. p. 1203) but not as unappetizing, this comes closer to last year's What Can You Do? (James Leigh- Harper & Row 1905) even though that was the sharper book. Kiss Nets about the long day spent, or misspent, by one Jimmy Rearden, the high school voluptuary of Weston, Illinois, beginning with his attempt to borrow some money from his friend Frederick Bowles Roberts (""capitalizing on his... condition... chronic virginity""). Fred doesn't come up with it and, in the hopes of buying a ticket to Hawaii and following Lisa, his girl--or one of them--there, Jimmy is busy conning money out of his kid sister, his boss, his boss' senescent mother. And in between he is spending his other energies with Denise, with Suzie, and with his first Older Woman (a friend of his mother's who turns out to be closer to his father). He gets drunk, he loses the money, he loses Lisa, and there must be a moral somewhere but it's hard to find. It's Just au account of the ars amoris of adolescence which will stand the hair up on most adults and turn it grey at the same time. But some of the humor works--it's full of cheeky nerve and verve.