Books: Little Women at Work

Once upon a time, grownups wrote fables for little girls. Nowadays little girls seem to be writing fables for grownups. Where once adolescents confided their innermost thoughts to “Dear Diary,” they now rush them, hot off the typewriter, to their literary agents. Most famous and successful among teen-age sophisticates is Francoise Sagan, who wrote Bonjour Tristesse at 18. Now 21. she is grown up, but there seems to be no shortage of young successors.

France, lately in bondage to nine-year-old Poetess Minou Drouet, is currently applauding Belgium’s Anne Bodart for a charming book of fables, most of which she wrote when she was 14. She had to wait until she reached a mellow 17 before her work was published in the U.S. (see below). Due in the U.S. early next year is Beau Clown by France’s Berthe Grinault, 16, a “strange, curious book” about a professor, a psychopathic killer and a clown. The publisher’s publicity agent describes Berthe as “a beautiful child of the earth, both innocent and diabolic.”

The U.S., as usual, is lagging behind in the innocence-cum-diabolism department, but there are signs of progress. Somewhat out of this class, both by virtue of her advanced years (22) and the intense seriousness of her subject matter, is Lucy Daniels (see below). While less concerned with sex than social conscience, her fine novel nevertheless manages to include hints of miscegenation as well as murder.

A more typical American contender in the Sagan sweeps is Pamela Moore, 18, a Barnard College senior, whose novel Chocolates for Breakfast will appear later this month. It deals with a fading movie star’s daughter named Courtney Farrell, who between 15 and 17 has an affair with her mother’s gigolo—a homosexual until the heroine sets him straight. After that it’s just one Yale man after another, until Courtney turns for intellectual companionship and “decency” to a Harvard law graduate—an “older man” of 25.