Anguished Imp

IF IT PROVE FAIR WEATHER--Isabel Paterson--Putnam ($2.50).

Isabel Paterson has all the best qualities of a chipmunk, including a love of stone walls and a sidelong, quizzical look. The resemblance would be still more marked if chipmunks wore lorgnettes. Her impish weekly literary column in the New York Herald Tribune, "Turns With a Bookworm," is appropriately signed I. M. P. Between columns Critic Paterson writes novels for much the same reason that the Irishman liked to be hit on the head--because they cause her so much anguish that mere personal calamities shrivel by comparison.

If It Prove Fair Weather, her latest, has anguished her for five years. It is the story of a seduction that never quite comes off. The principals: James Nathaniel Wishart, a cautious redhead who has been married for 20 years without finding out he is ticklish; Emmy Cruger, a divorced, slim-waisted, no longer youthful college teacher whose knees are ordinary but whose discernment is not. Businessman Wishart wants a return ticket to Cytherea. Emmy offers him the ticket but refuses to guarantee more than a one-way trip. Her attitude: "We have only one life to live, if that." So Wishart takes no trip. Though he is the man she wants, Emmy yields instead to a man she does not: Jervis Huntley, a truck owner curious to learn what a woman professor is like.

While talking to her confidante Christine, Emmy reflects that every conversation has at least four meanings--"the literal meaning of the words; and then what Christine thinks I mean; and the associational ideas in my mind, drawn from individual experience; and then the equivalent but entirely different points of reference in Christine's mind, to which I have no clue." Many a reader who admires Critic Paterson's flip newspaper way will shake a puzzled head over If It Prove Fair Weather. Those who are not scared off by its slow and mazy manner will enjoy its seriousness and sly competence.

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