Books: Degeneration of Vipers

OPUS 21 (375 pp.)—Philip Wylie—Rinehart ($3).

The characters in Philip Wylie's new novel include: the amiable madam of a New York call-house, two warm-hearted call-house girls, a nuclear physicist whose atomic know-how is equaled only by his abysmal no-know-how where dames are concerned, a woman who has run away from her botanist husband because she caught him kissing another man in the conservatory, and a Wylie version of Jesus Christ, his name abbreviated to Chris, who shows up in a persistent but inconclusive dream about a B-29 on an A-bomb run. Most of the...