Current & Various

(2 of 2)

It was some time ago that Hester Prynne elevated suburban adultery to a community sport in the U.S. The British, as Author Camp tells it, still have not quite got the hang of the game. Sarah Hewitt is the "scarlet woman of Bickerton" in the London exurbs, squired everywhere by the hearty Derek while her husband puts his life into his work in the City. Things are not what they seem: Sarah has not earned her letter at all, but is merely a bench-warmer wrestling around in the raw without ever quite coming to the point. Even when Sarah moves on to a more serious infatuation with impecunious Old Boy Stephen Hunter, their long awaited red-letter day turns out to be a nightmare: Stephen is impotent except when he is asleep. The result is that everybody suffers the penalties of adulterous anguish without ever tasting any of its furtive thrills in this drab, oddly flat, moral tale, and Camp's followers to the end are left to sigh with Sarah's spouse: "The world would be a far happier place if people weren't always analyzing their motives and ventilating their complexes."

PINKTOES by Chester Himes. 256 pages. Putnam-Stein & Day. $5.

This latest morsel from the previously published-only-in-Paris works of Olympia Press will disappoint smut lovers everywhere. It is at best a poor scraping from the bottom of the Candy barrel. Mamie Mason, Harlem hostess with the mostest, sets out to solve the Race Problem in her own forthright fashion by aiding and abetting two-tone cohabitation as widely and as often as possible among her vast collage of acquaintances. As a single, running, off-color joke, the novel turns out to be neither very funny nor very dirty. The level of its humor is set by Negro Author Chester Himes in a laboriously arch preface that explains that "pinktoes is a term of indulgent affection applied to white women by Negro men, and sometimes conversely by Negro women to white men, but never adversely by either." Sample line: "Her moments of tender intimacy with a big fine white man, if all were put together, would make a fine Swiss watch." Man!