Senator

DEAR SENATOR--McCready Huston--Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50;.

When he was a law student Dan Meredith had an interval of naive, idealistic love. He rescued an ambitious, desperate little actress who was just about to earn a job by her acquiescence in a hotel bedroom. Together they went to Atlantic City. Dan paid the bills for a week's platonic companionship. Then they were seen at dinner by three leading citizens of Dan's Midwest home town. While one of them told Dan he had a future in law and politics in his own state, another winked dirtily at the girl. Dan grew selfconscious, feared for his reputation, lost courage, quit the resort, leaving carfare to New York for bewildered Laurel Fife. She had never told him her name.

Laurel became a headliner. Dan learned grand-scale hypocrisy, back-room politics. When his wife, the wretched heroine of an "ideal'' marriage, met death in circumstances hinting of suicide, the obituaries were as respectable as all of Dan's press notices. Laurel knew him again in these coarsened, alcoholic, successful years, and continued to remember the week when he was Galahad. And anonymously she made the big contributions without which Dan could not have become, as he did, U. S. Senator.

Author Huston is an experienced newsman who has observed Midwest politics. The background of his story includes a damning portrait of the convention which nominated Warren G. Harding. Purely fictitious are the central scene and characters, the penumbrous stratagems which made Dan Meredith Senator, left him human wreckage. Yet they may well be typical of the recent degradation of politics. The novel, rich in implication, achieves tragic significance.