Books: Wife's-Eye View

THE BRIGHT PROMISE (373 pp.)—Richard Sherman—Litfle, Brown ($2.75).

Richard Sherman is a daring man who thinks he knows what goes on in a woman's head. He has written The Bright Promise in the first person feminine—as a wife's-eye view of an able, unstable husband whose career fluctuates between life on the dole and the brilliant editorship of a picture magazine. But despite the author's daring viewpoint, readers are not likely to know Amy Hardin Ellery any better than other heroines of women's magazine fiction.

The story begins with Amy's marriage to jobless Lyle Ellery the...