Beneficent Suicide

ANNE MINION'S LIFE--Myron Brinig--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Short-memoried newspaper readers still remember the gruesome case of John Warde, 26-year-old schizophrenic, who one morning last July climbed out on a 17th-story ledge of Manhattan's Hotel Gotham, eleven hours later jumped to a smashing death as 10,000 horrified watchers yelled: "There he goes!"

In that suicide Author Brinig (The Sisters, May Flavin) found the subject for Anne Minion's Life readymade. But he copied only part of the story--the physical details of how Anne Minton commits suicide. For his main story he leaves tormented Anne teetering on the ledge while he draws several characters from the mob below. Anne's suicide is pictured as less a tragedy than a blessing. Because of her example the wife of an unemployed worker cancels her trip to an abortionist (her husband has found a job when she gets home). A philandering playboy makes amends to his future fifth wife, thus saving her from suicide. An ambitious chorus girl consents to marry an amateur philosopher, retire to the simple life in a small town in Oregon.

It must be admitted that Author Brinig's fictitious suicide is more cheerful than John Warde's. But his awkward, correspondence-school prose, his amateur philosophizing make his story less dramatic than mere reporters' accounts of the real thing.

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