Design for Living

REVELRY BY NIGHT--J. Lawrence Barnard--Doubleday Doran ($2).

Park Cushing and his crowd in Mapleton on the South Shore of Long Island lived as though they were afraid of some intrusion, even of some innovation. They got uneasy when something unusual happened at one of their parties--as, for example, when Park's pretty wife Lynne, doing a dance with a pair of pots for a bra, lost her pots. That was a bit off the pattern. But it was all right for Peter Bailey to strew the living room with toilet paper. That was a tradition. It was also part of the pattern for Peter to find Park kissing Peter's wife. Peter remarked cheerily, "Some fun, eh, boss?" and strolled back to the dance.

Park had gone to a swank prep school and Yale, from which he graduated by a judicious choice of snap courses; had started as a runner in Wall Street, been taken into the firm by his father when he showed signs of getting married. Park's father tried to act like an English squire by smelling of tweeds, eau de cologne and tobacco, and by tracking birds across the Long Island marshes, accompanied by his docile wife and an unsatisfactory setter. His generation was bothered by taxes, the New Deal, and the encroachment of the big city and its Sunday panzer divisions. Park's generation was bothered, intermittently, by the prospect that the war might reduce its scale of living or upset its weekly routine--mild drinking on week nights, tennis, golf and horses on weekends, heavy drinking, dancing and flirtation on Saturday nights, recuperation Sundays on the beach, where no serious conversation was permitted.

Such was the upper-crust life in Mapleton, 1940, according to Writer Barnard, who is 29 and obviously knows his milieu and his people thoroughly. The end of the book is corny; it portrays Park Gushing, disintegrating because of wife trouble, brought to the verge of regeneration by a bad shock. But Revelry By Night is fluently readable, at times masterfully comic, and--for a first novel--a surprisingly deft study of a way of life that seems doomed to perish, as those in The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby and Appointment in Samarra already have.

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