Recent Fiction

DAISY KENYON--Elizabeth Janeway --Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). The men & women of today's glossy fiction lead jumpy, exciting lives. They carry out hush-hush Government missions and make big money as writers and artists. They drink lots of highballs, chain-smoke, worry about themselves and talk to each other in subtle banalities to cover their emotional high tension. They love with anxious violence--usually two people at the same time, until the last chapter. And mostly they are terribly good, terribly sensitive but terribly confused.

Elizabeth Janeway, whose first novel, The Walsh Girls, was a best-seller in 1943, has made Daisy Kenyan out of these fascinatingly unhappy people and their jittery world of New York, Washington, Connecticut, and Nantucket. At 32, Daisy is a beautiful, successful, emancipated magazine illustrator. For eight years her lover has been shrewd, rugged Dan O'Mara. Then she meets and marries high-strung magazine editor Peter Lapham.

But there is still something between Daisy and Dan : "The residue of love. An essence.

Very thin and clear and strong. Triple distilled. . . . There's no name." Daisy Kenyan has been bought by 20th Century-Fox for $150,000.

You AND I -- Myron Brinig -- Farrar & Rinehart {$3). Minneapolis-born Author Brinig has published 14 novels in the past 15 years (including Singermann, The Sisters, May Flavin). His new novel sug gests that he may be suffering from over production. You and I's 474 pages follow New Mexico-born Claire and Eric from childhood to marriage, taking in half the cities of Europe and the U.S. on the way.

You and I is also jampacked with minor characters, ranging from a sailor who takes his accordion to bed with him ("It takes up less room than a woman and sounds a hell of a lot better") to suave -Lord Kelvinston, who subsidizes the ballet and reeks of "inbred irony." You and I has amusing moments and non-stop action, but somehow it seems just to have been poured out of a big jug.

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