'Sister Anne

TOMORROW MORNING -- Anne Parrish -- Harpers ($2). Anne Parrish and her brother Dillwyn must have had a collection of aunts, grandmothers and female neighbors all of whom they loved until it hurt but who nearly drove them insane with fuss-budgeting, shilly-shallying, dibble-dabbling, microscopic solicitude and spiritual myopia. As the young authors-to-be grew up, quick-witted, sensitive, gay, they must have talked together for hours about these people and their plight -- perhaps in a meadow like the dewy one in their book Knee-High to aGrasshopper -- and been consumed by that uncomfortable emotion which is a mixture of furious exasperation and profound pity. They must have compacted to make a united effort some day to sting, poke, wheedle, pat and charm all such people out of their bungalow souls into the big bright mansions of life and the world.

Nothing else will account for Brother Dillwyn's recent book, that delicate crucifixion and beatification of mediocrity, Smith Everlasting (TIME, Oct. 18). Nothing else will account for this new book of Sister Anne's which is a duplicate of Brother Dillwyn's with just a few more hamperfuls of old-time clothes strewn in, a few more pantryfuls of homemade soups, salads, desserts, cakes, cookies and whipped cream.

The story of Kate Green and her son Joe and all their relatives and neighbors in Westlake, New England, is another story of the tragically commonplace and, its eternal power of keeping on. Sister Anne is a little cheerier than Brother Dillwyn. She lets at least one character, life-loving Evelyn, young Joe's wife, escape back to New York and Paris whence she came. She even lets her have Hope, her daughter (the small hope of Westlake), and puts all the agony on Joe's shoulders, which broaden by bearing it alone. But Kate, from the day she leaves art school to be the first Joe's bride, from that charming but shiftless Joe's early death in Westlake, through long years of pitying herself, loving little Joe, resolving to paint again but never doing it, running everywhere to take small presents and repeat cliches (a whole encyclopedia of them), Kate is forever and ever to blush unseen, to live unknowing and to be almost happy --Tomorrow Morning--through it all.

Of the wit, the sly digs and farces and innuendoes of these young Parrishes there is no telling. No situation, nobody is safe from them, especially from Sister Anne, who talks less than Brother Dillwyn but writes more. The sugary, slap-my-wrist, mother's-boy "line" she gives her J. Hartley Harrison, scoutmaster, is one of the most innocently poisonous characterizations ever done. Some of her others are: acidulous Aunt Sarah, 99, with parrot and enema bags; dependable, blockheaded Charlotte, who marries Hoagland Driggs; the fat little heir across the street; wan, wishful Carrie, Aunt Sarah's slave; and--flashes--sultry, vivid Opal Mendoza, "bad girl," the only one whose words comfort Joe at all; squat, square, red-faced Effa, "simply killing," a perpetual circus, whose salt tears run into her broad mouth when she smells the lilacs and knows she will never have a lover.

How they can write, these Parrishes! Let no-one say that Sister Anne, just because of The Perennial Bachelor, is a "one-book" lady. The one, the only thing-is--if she would only be a touch less the dressmaker, the housewife, 'the minute conversational satirist. Even Evelyn is made to think that the clouds are by "God's eggbeater." As Evelyn says elsewhere: "Think of being away from bridge lamps and fruit cocktails!" The book's last line might have been: "God's in His kitchen, all's well with the world."