This Man and This Woman
by .Vanguard, $2.75.
The latest novel by the author of Studs Lonigdn is probably the most dismal work of the year turned in by any serious fiction writer of established reputation. Farrell’ s tale focuses on the sustained disharmony between a nagging, hysterical 53-year-old wife and her gentle, tired-out, 63-year-old husband, a dispatcher in the Express Company. Whatever pathos may exist in the situation is pretty much erased by the story’s unrelieved dreariness and insistent bad taste. The climax, in which Peg Callahan goes batty and kills her husband with a kitchen knife, aroused in this reader the feelings which a humane adult might experience when a fly or grasshopper, which has been tortured by nasty children, is finally squashed into unconsciousness.