Books: Frou-Frou

FRIENDS AND ROMANS—Virginia Faulkner—Simon & Schuster ($2). If the recent heat wave had done nothing more than bring this ephemeral bloom to flower, it was worth it. Seldom has a first novel been written with higher good humor or a more disarming wit than Virginia Faulkner's Friends and Romans.* A "comico-romantic novel," it breaks nobody's bones or butterflies, lets no threatening skeletons loose on a frightened world, hurls no manifesto, literary or political. Pertinacious sniffers might accuse Author Faulkner of abetting James Joyce in attempting to restore the pun as an honest...