Books: For the Singing Birds

CADENZA (223 pp.)—Ralph Cusack—Hougton Mifflin ($3.50).

Several remarkable platters of pressed peat have been offered the reader in recent years, the more bizarre of them including At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien (alias Myles na gCopaleen), and The Ginger Man (TIME, June 2), by J. P. Donleavy. Ireland's Ralph Cusack, an eccentric horticulturist and ex-painter, has written Cadenza as if to prove that O'Brien and Donleavy were squares and that James Joyce was well within his rights when he borrowed the English language and returned it in a condition unfit for use by the original...