No Shirker

BELIEVE THE HEART--Raymond Holden --Holt ($2.50).

Believe the Heart is the 497-page study --a good deal more interesting than the people it presents--of the slow maturing of Leda Fillmore, and of her relationships with 1) the memory of her dead husband, 2) her newborn son, 3) a difficult mother-in-law, 4) a wise obstetrician, 5) a somewhat crass young lawyer, 6) off-stage troubles in the steel company she has inherited. She marries the lawyer, who is inadequate as a substitute for her first husband, and wins the helpful advice and abiding friendship of the doctor. In the long run she is glad she married the man she did, not sorry she did not marry the man she didn't. And the company trouble comes to a good ending, too.

Thus considered, the novel is far from fascinating. What gives it its considerable interest is Author Holden's dogged, intelligent exploration of precisely those matters which run-of-the-mine novelists shirk: namely, the ambiguous complexities of even the most "normal" motives and actions. These subtleties and minutiae are themselves the true substance of this story. Lacking entirely the brilliance of the best work in its field, lacking no less the textbook glibness of the cheap work, as a psychological novel, Believe the Heart is definitely to be respected.

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