Books: Blood and Orgies

THE SOUND OF AN AMERICAN—David Ormsbee—Dutton ($2.50).

David Ormsbee is a new name in U.S. fiction, but he is not. As Henri Weiner and Paul Haggard he has written detective stories. As Stephen Longstreet he has written an amusing travelogue (Last Man Around the World, TIME, Sept. 1, 1941).

The Sound of an American has already stirred up considerable cacophony. The book, a sequence of bedroom scenes staged before and during the fall of France, has been compared to the work of Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Tolstoy. It has also been called clumsily vulgar and...