Architect for the literary housing development known as Gibbsville, Pa. (Appointment in Samarra, A Rage to Live), John O'Hara has added another tri-level mansion at Ten North Frederick (Random House, $3.95). In this one, he pokes around the well-appointed boudoirs of the Chapin clan, three generations' worth, and reports their after sundown gymnastics just about the way Jack Webb might handle it: "She was under the covers and they kissed and embraced. He put his knee between her legs. She made a sound like a moan." O'Hara does, however, manage to deliver the facts, ma'am -- dull as they sometimes are -- about small town gentry and how ridicuously easy it is for a man to be destroyed by an avaricious female or two, in or out of the sack.
A readable rundown of the last Broadway season is The Best Plays of 1954-1955 (Dodd, Mead, $5). This is the newest addition to the fine series of annual volumes started 38 years ago by Burns Mantle. The series fell upon evil days when, for a ghastly interim after Mantle's demise, it was edited by New York's least qualified drama critic (who shall be nameless); but now it is under the wing of sharp-minded Louis Kronenberger. Condensed versions of Bus Stop, The Desperate Hours, Inherit the Wind, The Boy Friend, Witness for the Prosecution and five other successes form the nucleus of the book; and if a few of them make something less than effervescent reading, there are plenty of photographs, Hirschfeld caricatures and fascinating statistics to help weather the doldrums.
Max Shulman's Guided Tour of Campus Humor (Hanover House, $2.95) is a big barrel of boffola siphoned from college humor magazines during the last half century. The curriculum includes courses in history as it couldn't possibly have happened, lacerated languages, songs that mother wouldn't dare teach, parodies on science and the arts, dandy jokes and sundry other works that defy classification. You'll also get a chance to chuckle at some of the undergraduate recollections of Thurber, Leacock, Heywood Broun and Shulman himself.
Frank Brookhouser's Now I Lay Me Down (Alan Swallow, $2.75) is described on the cover as a "novel," but actually it's more like a scrapbook of character sketches, fragments of dialog, old jokes and other oddments -- all of which add up to an interesting but chaotic picture of the dives and denizens of the Bop Age. As a writer, Brookhouser is sensitive, experimental, sexually aware; and if he is possibly a little self-conscious in the bargain, even this is a nice change from the lacklustre reportage which often passes for prose among many of today's gray-flanneled novelists. Sections of this book originally appeared in Playboy.
