Books: Reconstruction

BREATHE UPON THESE SLAIN—Evelyn Scott—Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Like a paleontologist who reconstructs what might have been a dinosaur from a fragment of its jawbone, Evelyn Scott has built a life-size novel from a few strangers' photographs. In her rented East Anglian cottage Author Scott found herself wondering about the people whose group pictures helped adorn the walls, soon was giving names, relationships, histories to their different faces. Though she does not claim infallibility for her method, she implies that a knowledge of contemporary types is all a novelist requires for such a reconstruction:...