His & Hers

THE LOVING COUPLE (269 pp.) --Virginia Rowans--Crowe// ($3.50).

The most remarkable thing about this book is that it can--indeed, must--be read from back to front as well as front to back. The book has two title pages, two opening chapters. In fact, to let the secret out, it is two stories. It tells the same incident--a marital quarrel--from the point of view of the husband as well as the wife.* Like "his" and "hers" towels in the bathroom, the notion is apt to be a little obvious and excessively cute. But if the reader can keep from getting dizzy turning the book over, he will still have fun, because behind Author "Virginia Rowans" hides the beard of Edward Everett Tanner III, who, under the pseudonym of Patrick Dennis, wrote the runaway bestseller, Auntie Mame.

The strains on John and Mary's marriage are, luckily, all external. John is a good writer gone wrong as an advertising manager. John's boss is the bottom-pinching proprietor of an outfit that manufactures "PulseBeat Eternal Non-Magnetic" watches. Trouble arrives with Besame Bessamer, the boss's stepdaughter, whose pulse beat, particularly when she is near John, is entirely too magnetic. Along the way of his thin plot, Author Tanner looses his most devastating attacks on flossy Manhattan restaurants and nightclubs catering to lovers of bad food, overpriced booze and rotten entertainment--the result being a sort of reverse Duncan Hines guide. Throughout, the fact that John loves Mary, and vice versa, is seldom news.

* Publishing gimmicks seldom appear alone. Next month two collections of essays about married life (by Emily Hahn and Eric Hatch) will appear in the same back-to-back book form.

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