SPIDER BOY−Carl Van Vechten−Knopf ($2.50).
No place for the man who loves home and normalcy, Hollywood is grist to the mill of the farceur. Van Vechten takes a spineless playwright, lover of normalcy, and pitches the unwilling wretch into a kaleidoscope of temperamental screen-stars, their mamas (chaperones?) and parasitic Spanish nobles, of shrewd Jewish producers and bland rewrite men. Imperia Starling snatches Ambrose Deacon to her Italio-Spanish-Tudor-Romanesque villa, gives him a small dinner party for 60 or 80, makes passionate love to him, orders him to write her a script. He escapes to...