Epigrammar

THE BARBARIANS--Virginia Faulkner-- Simon & Schuster ($2).

Readers who chuckled over Virginia Faulkner's first novel, Friends and Romans (TIME, July 23), last week reached with smiling expectation for her second. Like her first, The Barbarians is a light-hearted farce compounded of verbal high jinks, a glass house epigrammed in chromium, furnished (in spots) with topical puns. An unserious book if there ever was one, it should appeal to those who like their chatter in book form; might even do a little missionary work among the followers of the late Thorne Smith.

Characters are a set of bohemian rapscallions of both sexes who infest a pension in Paris and call themselves the Barbarians. Ready for anything, especially a change of scene or conversation, they flit en masse to the Riviera, where they continue to astound the bourgeois with their wisecracks and giddy japes, indulge in a few harmless bedroom scenes, fall in & out of love, flit back to Paris again and continue their galvanic act until their stage manager's timely curtain. Samples of their epigrammar: "Two gongs don't make a rite." An engagement "is exactly like giving a hungry man a menu and then turning him out of the restaurant." ". . . Genius is merely an infinite capacity for growing pains." Those who know Gertrude Stein's famed motto may snicker at "A Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls."

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