Books: Body Love

NO ADAM IN EDEN by Grace Metalious. 312 pages. Trident Press. $4.95.

THE THREE SIRENS by Irving Wallace. 572 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

The cute little intimacies that filled the pages of Peyton Place took on a special piquancy via hints that Author Grace Metalious had merely written about her own domestic career up in lustful, hypocritical, murderous New England. The sequels that followed prolonged the speculation; if they weren’t written on the kitchen table, how could they be so smeared with jam? Irving Wallace gained a certain respectability by pretending that his fat novels (The Chapman Report, The Prize) were based on research—research that delved into the odd aberrations of sex ual surveyors and Nobel prizewinners. Now both are back with new novels—one, at least, with a difference.

This time Metalious has foxed rumormongers by creating a cast of characters that couldn’t be anybody. She traces the roots of their wretchedness to a neighborhood of Quebec that could have been invented only by a writer eager to fix Canada’s wagon for banning Peyton Place. Her point seems to be that frigidity leads to murder and murder leads to sloth, drunkenness and terrible profanity. In three generations of women, only one survives to appreciate the wonders of conjugal love. Looking back on the murderous folly of her mother and granny, the heroine exclaims with the joy of enlightenment: “You know what’s the matter with them? They can’t love.” But her husband is too busy playing with her to pay attention. “You can Jove,” he says. “You can give. So give.”

Wallace dispatches a team of anthropologists and wives to study the perfect sexual harmony that exists among 200 noble savages on the Three Sirens islands. The islanders all seem to have read Choctaw editions of Havelock Ellis and orate in stiff English on the wonders of coeducational outhouses (“the one true democracy”), the Social Aid Hut where husbands suffering from frigid wives can go for relief, and the absurdity of necking. The invaders represent a spectrum of heterosexual appetites and respond to the natives’ wisdom according to their own maladies. One shows the bored natives dirty pictures, another dances with her breasts bare, a third settles down to life as a sort of U.S. sex attache.

Since anthropologists are just as entitled as Kinsey-Chapman investigators to discuss sex in solemnly clinical detail, Wallace has obviously come upon a literary genre that may proliferate indefinitely.