Books: Ode to the Expatriate Dead

THE MALEFACTORS (312 pp.)—Caroline Gordon—Horcourt, Brace ($3.95).

The spiritual hangover of the Lost Generation has gone on for a quarter of a century now, and the pain is beginning to settle in the neck of the reader. Novelist Caroline Gordon, 60, a onetime expatriate (class of '29-'30) varies the familiar symptoms slightly by making hers a lost-and-found generation novel. In the pages of The Malefactors, the mourning after the big Paris binge becomes a kind of purgatory on the road to religious serenity. In keeping with its semi-autobiographic overtones (Author Gordon and her poet-critic-novelist...