THE GATES OF AULISGladys SchmittDial ($2.75).
In this first novel, with great seriousness and intensity, Miss Schmitt makes a try at a genuine U.S. tragedy. Too few U.S. writers try that, and almost none succeed. Miss Schmitt deserves a medal for valor, not for success.
Carl Hasselmann and his sister Ellie, provincial, supersensitive Americans, dwell in the uneasy revulsions of a sort of spiritual incest. They represent, respectively, the frigid, inhumane predicament of mind-without-spirit and the equally suicidal predicament of spirit-without-mind. Carl's mental drive stretches him flat on the altar he has built before a hypnotic social theorist. Ellie is impelled to sacrifice...