SHE LET HIM CONTINUE.

By StephenGeller '62. New York: E. P. Dutton &Co., 1966. 128 pp. $3.50.

Steve Geller was a very entertaining undergraduate. He wrote and produced a number of funny plays, and he wrote some amusing dialogue in some unfunny plays He was an excellent pyrotechnical conversationalist and a hilarious stream-of-unconscious correspondent. His Dartmouth classmates, friends, and teachers have long been confident that Steve would have a great comic play produced or comic novel published soon.

Well, he has, but She Let Him Continue is about as funny as a smashed baby-buggy It is a short novel, almost telegraphic in its directness. Written in the first person, it exposes the thoughts and actions of a psychotic teenage fugitive and his nymphet girlfriend during one harrowing week.

It is unfair to Geller to compare him to other current novelists, since She Let HimContinue is unlike any other novel I have read. And it is dangerous to categorize any writer on the basis of one book. Yet his story does bring to mind such diverse books and authors as Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Lolita by Victor Nabokov, The Night of theHunter by Davis Grubb, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and inevitably Catcher inthe Rye by J. D. Salinger. Denis Pitts of She Let Him Continue is a Holden Caulfield lost, damned, and unsalvageable.

Though the characters may be haunted and tawdry, the book as a work of art is almost flawless. Not a word is wasted and not a scene is unnecessary. Geller has wrought a small masterpiece, a short novel with big implications. The book is compelling lingin its narrative drive and unforgettable in its revelation of some of the roads man seeks out to hell.

Assistant Director, Hopkins Center