IN his new novel, Elia Kazan gives us a young woman

who is a mystery--to us and to herself. She is small-boned,

fragile; beautiful and strongly sexual; a girl who has

grown up charming others. When we first see her, she is

blushing. She seems shy and uncertain, yielding, a perfect

and pleasing kitten.

All her life Ethel has been searching for strength--in

men. Now she thinks she has found that strength in the

young petty officer she is going to marry. Teddy is hand-

some and he is passionate, but his real attraction lies in a

certain assurance, his look of being in control, in com-

mand. Teddy is the hero who will not fail her, who will

not disappoint her, whom she cannot run away from as

she has run away from all the others.

And the moment she meets Teddy s father, Costa

Avaliotis, she recognizes instinctively the source of

Teddy s strength. Costa: stubborn, arrogant, protective,

ferociously loyal to the old ways, the old codes; a true

Greek patriarch; a man of the sea, with a sea captain s

absolute authority, a personal presence like an elemental

force. Ethel finds herself drawn to the father as well as

the son, determined to be a proper Greek daughter as

well as a proper Greek wife. She wants nothing more than

to throw away the rich, permissive way of life she has

been handed by her successful surgeon father for the sim-

plicities and absolutes that Costa, and his entire world of

Florida fishermen and sponge divers, have preserved intact

from their Greek village past. And when Teddy no longer

seems to her as strong as she thought, there is Costa him-

self--to please, to obey, to rely on.

But suddenly one morning--she doesn t know why--

her old pattern takes over, and she is on the move again,

from place to place, from one man to the next. The angry

Puerto Rican metalworker who turns to violence when

she injures his pride.., the Navy psychiatrist who

glimpses something of her hidden nature through his

self-absorption...the young Mexican executive, won-

derful to look at, who shows off like a bullfighter, await-

in~ her flatterv, disquieted by her detachment ("In her