THE CRAVINGS OF DESIRE

Nona, a beautiful and spoiled Russian emigre is emphatically beset with the cravings of desire when after a quarter of a century of marriage to her author husband she has her face lifted. Capricious by nature, Nona contracts a series of liaisons, mostly with younger and impossible men. The results of her prodigious activities are the implications that she and her long suffering American husband, Brevard, are jewel thieves and possibly murderers. And then there is the inevitable Yankee family, Brevard's parents who live in New Hampshire, never quite accepting the bizarre white Russian, but, nevertheless, doling out their fortune to her and their Bohemian son. There is an attempt here at ultra sophistication- the straight-faced reportage of impossible unconventionality. There is every effort made to be zany and chic and stylishly melancholy as Brevard and even Nona think with a bittersweet smile of the meaning of life. But none of this can be possible or effective without being entertaining, and this, after the first chapter, The Cravings of Desire, by the author of Early to Bed and Portrait in Laughter, never really is.