Books: Odor of Soap

EXPERIMENT—Helen Hull—Coward, McCann ($2.50).

This book consists of four short novels.

1) In With the One Coin for Fee two aging women, girlhood friends, meet after many years as 1938's New England hurricane blows up. One is at the end of a sexually avid and shameless career; the other is a spinster who jealously despises her. They die in the hurricane, reconciled.

2) In Food for Thought an indigent young professor, almost parted from his wife, his sons, his frowsy household, by a first flirtatious glimpse of suburban high life, is cured because he has a bad time at a high life dinner.

3) In...