MAY WE BORROW YOUR HUSBAND?

This is Graham Greene's third collection of catchy, sketchy short stories, one or two miniaturized to not more than five or six pages. They are subtitled And Other Comedies of the Sexual Life which connotes a little of their trifling sophistication. In the title story, two homosexuals appropriate a honeymooning husband; in Mortmain. a second marriage seems to be haunted by the first—letters, and little domestic reminders, lurk everywhere; Two Gentle People confide on a park bench and over dinner before returning in resignation to their wretched marital existence; Jerome loses his adored father in A Shocking Accident—a pig falls on him.... The backgrounds vary from Antibes to England, and they are all told with a casual, conversational ease—a deceptive sleight of hand which may also suggest that there's not too much up the sleeve.