Books: Also Current: Oct. 23, 1964

SPEAK NOT EVIL by Edwin Lanham. 591 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

Grubbing into the lives of small-town sexual delinquents of all ages has been a tempting novelistic idea ever since Peyton Place. Lanham adds an overlay of Big Ideas (religion, tradition, history) but is careful to provide the full familiar stock company: the nymphomaniac who gives strip parties and records the livelier moments on Polaroid film, the budding teen-age sexpot, the aging Don Juan, the middle-aged mother who has never responded to a man, the impotent bridegroom, the spinster who had an abortion in her youth. At one point the...

Want the full story?

Subscribe Now

Subscribe
Subscribe

Learn more about the benefits of being a TIME subscriber

If you are already a subscriber sign up — registration is free!