Unheroic Roe

HUMAN BEING--Christopher Morley--Doubleday, Dor an ($2.50).

Christopher Morley, whose taste is not always unexceptionable, might have picked a better name for his latest hero than Richard Roe. The name, with other Roe-ish actions and qualities, will irresistibly remind many a reader who has seen the Pulitzer-Prizewinning Of Thee I Sing of that forgotten man, Alexander Throttlebottom. Author Morley has not tried to make his hero heroic but he has certainly not intended to go to the other extreme and make him vicepresidential.

Instead of telling his story straight out, Author Morley is at some pains, though ineffectually, to convince the reader that a casual acquaintance was so impressed by Hero Roe's unimpressive personality and fate that he determined to write a really microscopically fair biography of him. In spite of this unnecessary ring-around-a-rosy, the facts of the story gradually emerge. Roe was an ordinary but wide-eyed, simple young man. When he married Lucille, became a father, Manhattan apartment-dweller, traveling salesman for a big publisher, he thought everything was fine. But Lucille's clay was commoner than his. Her jealousy and his naivete combined to topple him from grace. Without altogether falling in love he became very very fond of Minnie. When he set up in business for himself it was Minnie who really made things go. At times she was his mistress, but never in office hours. Minnie finally realized that Richard was not the mistress-loving type, that he was essentially a homebody. So she tried to fix things up with Lucille, but of course it did not work. When Richard died of a heart attack on a Lackawanna ferry. Minnie could remember him comfortably, but Lucille had to lie about it.

Author Morley has kept himself fairly strictly to the matter in hand, has apparently almost sublimated his sense of pun--as may be seen from such an example as ''treble yell." Some readers will be enraged, as usual, by his occasional genteel vulgarity--in speaking of one about to be sick as "going to be ill"; of a woman's being able to "really settle down in the sedentary comfort for which women are so charmingly cushioned."

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