Heredity

THAT NICE YOUNG COUPLE--Francis Hackett -- Boni, Liveright ($2.00). Floundering fearfully through the litter of spare adjectives, similes and metaphors that has been accumulating in his office for years, Critic Hackett of The New Republic and elsewhere finally gets his first novel out in the open and into sustained motion on Page 245, where childless Eleanor Byrd Beale from the Middle West is about to meet Demi-Artist Stephen Tannay from the South, fall really in love for the first time in her life and be willfully unfaithful to her husband, Lawyer Edward Beale of Brooklyn, Harvard and Manhattan. Up to that point, characters and motives have progressed only by lurches, blockaded by Mr. Hackett's gesticulating presence. Eleanor and Stephen get away splendidly, but stall in their big love scene, which is therefore obscene. Frantic, Mr. Hackett descends again to the crank, gets them chugging through an idyll in Virginia. Edward barely escapes nervous wreckage at a memorable Democratic convention. Eleanor finds the low road tarred. The nice young couple are reunited on the high road of respectability and drive happily out of a study in U. S. heredity which is too good to overlook and too bad, considering the author's flashes of ability, to be excused