Books: Women's Lib Western

THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING

by MARILYN DURHAM 246 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$6.95.

It can be said of First Novelist Marilyn Durham that she has the courage of her daydreams. The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing is basically pure feminine fantasy, but the treatment is so fresh and untroubled that the book is one of the most effective entertainments of recent months.

The heroine is a reluctant frontierswoman of the 1880s named Catherine Crocker. At 35—a refreshingly ripe age for a heroine—Catherine is marooned in a Wyoming mining camp with her boorish husband. After one quarrel too many, she decides to flag a train to civilization. But the train is robbed by four bandits whose hostage she becomes. Naturally, the leader is not your ordinary outlaw. Strong, silent and sexy, Jay Grobart is stealing in a good cause. Ten years earlier he killed his Indian wife, Cat Dancing, in a jealous rage. Having paid his debt to society, he is seeking to buy back his children from the Shoshone who adopted them.

As they face the privations and adventures that follow, Jay and Catherine quickly develop a Tracy-Hepburn love-hate relationship. Jay is cold and scornful; Catherine feels that she has traded one insufferable male for another. But eventually accommodation follows passion down a well-worn path.

Jay is a standard frontier alien, but Catherine is a refreshing variant of the headstrong heroine. She is a potentially capable woman to whom nothing has happened, so she has nothing to bring to a sudden flood of experience except some mulish preconceptions. Durham leads her through the standard scenes: the learn-your-place tethering by Jay, the strip-or-go-filthy decision, the threat of lascivious Indians. Catherine handles them all incongruously.

Though the narrative is occasionally crude, Author Durham has one important veteran's trait. The reader senses at once that he is in sure hands and trusts her. One feels that, like Margaret Mitchell, she knows absolutely everything about her main character and could tell as many tales as Scheherazade about her. Producer-Director Eleanor Perry, who has bought the book for the movies, has proclaimed it "the first Women's Lib western"—just what the movement needs. The remark is understandable because Catherine is ultimately stronger and less rigid than the men who try to run her life. But Marilyn Durham is not inspired by headlines. What she is doing is spinning her yarn in the age-old, instantly recognizable way.