FICTION: Sophisticated Crevices

THE HARD-BOILED VIRGIN— Frances Newman—Boni & Liveright ($2.50).

Read the first ten pages to catch the style, the last 100 pages to enjoy the pick of the wise-cracks," which in acute Miss Newman's connection are not facetious explosions but sophisticated crevices. A straight string of sentences forever declarative but never simple, 285 pages of cleverly affected monotone unbroken by anything more sensational than "and's" and."but's," narrate the outward efforts and inner constrictions of Katharine Faraday of Peachtree Street, Atlanta, in her evolution from a plain, flat-chested, bookish little girl whose snobby breeding makes her snoopy about sex, into a cosmopolitan esthete whose virginity rests upon her like the shirt of Nessus. Before she finally nerves herself to endure seduction (her life's major anticlimax) she has become an unpreferred, brunette counterpart of the blonde that gentlemen preferred.

Specimen notations: "Sufficiently casual mention of Jesus Christ redeemed a dull sentence as certainly as a strip of pimento redeemed three pale stalks of asparagus,"

"In Georgia, no lady was supposed to know she was a virgin until she had ceased to be one."

"When she wept before the 'Last Supper' in Milan she was so much pleased with such a proof of her emotional nature that she conceived an admiration of Leonardo da Vinci which lasted all her life."

"Whenever she saw a girl shopping with a baby held hotly in her arms she decided again to be good and let anyone who liked be clever."