Love Before D-Day

THE SIXTH OF JUNE (351 pp.).--Lionel Shapiro--Doubleday ($3.95).

If it had not been for the war, handsome young Brad Parker would have automatically climbed the masthead of his father-in-law's Connecticut newspaper and remained true to his socialite wife Jane. If it had not been for the war, lovely, English Valerie Russell would never have become a Red Cross girl, and fallen in love with Brad while still the tacit fiancee of slim, tight-lipped John Wynter. What Brad and Val do to John and Jane and each other in this story of hand-holding across the seas in wartime makes for a slack tale slickly told.

Mental Fig Leaves. Hero Brad is a paper shuffler at SHAEF, and a first lieutenant. Haunted by the glacial respectability of his New England future after the war, he wants to have an adulterous fling while he can. But his low-level imaginings rarely embrace anything more than a brief, businesslike interlude with a party girl. Instead he meets Val, the grave-eyed brunette daughter of an invalided British brigadier, fully Jane's social opposite number and twice as good-looking. They fall immediately and desperately in love, and exchange guilty confidences about his wife and her friend Wynter, a commando officer in North Africa. But despite prolonged emotional twitching and teasing, Author Shapiro keeps his lovers' mental fig leaves so firmly in place that they sin only in their minds. To a love affair which proves to be as innocuous as Pablum, Author Shapiro adds some government-issue characters from the standard stockpile of all war novels. There is the hero's uncouth, hell-for-leather pal who "buys it" on Dday. There is the bullet-spitting ex-auto salesman, bucking for general, who comes drunkenly apart at the seams once he gets a briefing on the German fortifications in his attack sector. There are camp followers, goldbricks and, for a touch of sentimental local color from the blitz-days, some village home guards fumbling earnestly with their simulated weapons.

Halos Askew. Against this backdrop, Brad and Val drift towards a hoked-up farewell. Brad volunteers for a suicide outfit with a D-day dawn mission, only to find that his last-minute C.O. is Val's other lover, John. As they make the beach yards apart, both men nearly buy it--but live to come out of it with a reluctant mutual respect. Back in England a few days later, with sacrificial halos slightly askew. Brad and Val call it quits: "She said, 'Turn your head away.' He knew she was leaving . . ."

Except for its loving re-creation of England in wartime and an explosive 20-page finale of beachhead action (Canadian-born Author Shapiro himself covered Sicily, Salerno and Normandy as a war correspondent), there is less reason for The Sixth of June to be remembered than remaindered. The fact that it is the Book-of-the-Month Club choice for August may make it an automatic bestseller, but it will strike many readers as 31 days' praise too many.

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