Tender Mercy
by .
Creative Age, $1.00.
An admirably tense, suspenseful piece of storytelling. After years of trial and error, the wealthy Ballards have found in Elizabeth Powell the ideal young woman for an unpleasant job — looking after their grown-up son. Aaron, an incurable idiot. Elizabeth is joined, shortly after the book opens, by her husband Rudy, who has spent three years in a T.B. sanatorium at the Ballards’ expense: the two Powells have been offered a comfortable home in the Ballard household. Rudy, an undersized man consumed with pathological resentments, discovers that the Ballards’ fear of losing his wife puts them completely in his power. Aaron has become so devoted to Elizabeth he is utterly unmanageable without her; and Elizabeth, though devoted to the Ballards, is tied to her husband by his compelling sexuality.
The ensuing drama of blackmail is adroitly underwritten and excitingly plotted. The characters, without being deeply explored, are firmly defined and psychologically persuasive. Mr. Kaufman’s is a modest but effective novel.