Books: Breakage on Brattle Street

WE HAPPY FEW (345 pp.)—Helen Howe—Simon & Schuster ($2.75).

The title refers, in irony, to a select circle of the prewar Harvard faculty, to which the heroine is hostess; the novel exhibits the breakdown of 1) the principle of selection, 2) the circle, and 3) the hostess. Miss Howe (sister of radio commentator Quincy Howe, daughter of Mark De Wolfe Howe) works a modest claim in territory on which J. P. Marquand had an option. Her ear is attentive, though incapable of his flights of parody; her knowledge of Boston, Cambridge and Harvard politics...