Youth in Love

[good solid copy with minimal shelfwear, small faded spot at top of spine (matching jacket chip); jacket chipped at top of spine, worn and nicked along top edge, moderately soiled at rear panel, split along front flap-fold for about 2/3 of its length (but held together nicely by new mylar jacket protector)]. Novel about a woman "whose unique business enterprise plunges her into that 'veritable bonfire of summer affairs,' New York in vacation time. Loyalty to her friends drafts her, unwillingly, for a prominent role in the comedy and tragedy which overwhelm the lives of people who permit a youthful summer passion to master them." ------ OK, let's just stop right there. This is one of those infuriatingly oblique jacket blurbs that make you wonder "just what the hell is this book ABOUT, anyway" Well, for your edification I have at least read far enough into the thing to ascertain what this dame's "unique business enterprise" is: she operates sort of an underground restaurant called The Rendezvous, designed as "a place where men can't bring their wives to dine, but can meet them -- as if it were a sort of tryst for sweethearts. It gives married couples a legitimate outlet for their suppressed and unadmitted desire to be single again." (There are separate entrances for men and women, concealed as a tobacconist's shop and a beauty parlor respectively.) Ah, but here's the rub, you see: it seems that some couples are breaking the rules by meeting up there when they're not actually, ahem, married (or at least not to each other). Apparently (returning to the jacket blurb), if you keep reading the action eventually shifts to other New York-in-the-summerish locales like a cabin in the Catskills and a beach in the Hamptons. (Judging from the expression on the face of the woman in the somewhat unsettling jacket illustration, there might be some drug overdose involved -- or maybe she's just drunk.) I guess author Walter Marquiss was a real guy (as opposed to a Macaulay house pseudonym, I mean): someone with the same name did a little pulp-magazine writing, co-authored a play called "Whirlpool" that ran for three, count 'em, three performances on Broadway in 1929, and published at least one more novel, "Brutus Was an Honorable Man," in 1946. OCLC reports only five libraries holding this book.

Product Info

Publisher: The Macaulay Company

Year: (c.1934)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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