Short Notices

THIS ANIMAL IS MISCHIEVOUS by David Benedictus, 209 pages, New American Library. $4.95.

A pleasantly arrogant young Briton and his pretty, skittish twin sister are unwittingly trapped in the warfare between a cell of Black Muslim-type activists and a clutch of Negro-baiting neoFascists. Eventually the twins bob up at an international Fascist jamboree atop Mount Parnassus, where the Negroes attack the Fascists in their meeting-tent, then rape and murder the sister. The hero escapes to go home to pamphleteer in the cause of tolerance, and to get himself happily married. "The answer to everything," he concludes, is contained "within the magic of reciprocal love." Author Benedictus' discursive, Edwardian elegance of style is amusingly suited to satirizing upper-class pretentiousness, but his Negro characters are simply stereotypes and his twittering wittiness collapses at last into sentimentality.

THE AFTERNOON WOMEN by Lael Tucker Wertenbaker, 312 pages, Little, Brown. $4.95.

Lael Tucker Wertenbaker is the widow of Journalist Charles Wertenbaker, whose illness from terminal cancer and ultimate suicide she chronicled with cloying intimacy in Death of a Man (TIME, April 1, 1957). In this novel about a kindly abortionist and his heterogeneous clientele, she argues that a woman should never have to bear a baby that she doesn't want. There may well be sound arguments in support of this proposition, but they get lost in the wash of a tendentious soap opera.