Books: Anguished Imp

IF IT PROVE FAIR WEATHER—Isabel Paterson—Putnam ($2.50).

Isabel Paterson has all the best qualities of a chipmunk, including a love of stone walls and a sidelong, quizzical look. The resemblance would be still more marked if chipmunks wore lorgnettes. Her impish weekly literary column in the New York Herald Tribune, "Turns With a Bookworm," is appropriately signed I. M. P. Between columns Critic Paterson writes novels for much the same reason that the Irishman liked to be hit on the head—because they cause her so much anguish that mere personal calamities shrivel by comparison.

If It Prove Fair Weather, her latest, has anguished...