DOUBLEFIELDS

This is a collection (circa ten each) of memories and short stories, the former rather sketchier than the latter, although there is a certain consistency to all of Elizabeth Enright's writing; it is prepossessing, discreet rather than subtle, responsive rather than thoughtful. The Memories return to the crib, a pre-World War infancy in New York when "nothing was sad" with her artist parents, cameos of Washington Square, of Paris as an art student, of England—the Wordsworth country, of her children, of change—changes. The stories have a welcome variety rather than stamina: a woman of fifty traveling alone in Europe, anxiously apprehensive that she is losing an old lover, hears its corroboration in The Stroke of Twelve; summer ends for another middleaged woman during A Moment in September when she discovers her husband's past adultery; in Siesta, a suffusively attentive mother is at the bedside of her youngster who is happily engaged in the reverie that all adults are dead; a woman " just as dead now as all the others" celebrates her centenary; and the title story, the most incisive, follows the course of a well-born, wealthy scion from an emasculated youth to an irrational middleage isolated from people through his lust for "irrelevant objects"— a harp, a watch, a figurine, a ring.... The collection on the whole has greater competence than consequence but it will be read, easily enough, by women.