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Raymond Radiguet called Count d’Orgel (Grove Press, $3.00), his second and last novel, “a romance in which it is the psychology that is romantic.” This is an exact description of a book which seems packed with incident, although in fact very little happens that would normally come under the heading.

The action of the novel is almost all interior, subjective, with the effect of objective, exterior event. Radiguet describes states of mind as if they were campaigns. He does not use the stream-of-conseiousness technique or attempt to draw the reader into his imaginary world and make him participate in the feelings of the inhabitants. Instead he displays the imaginary world in such a blaze of clarity that it fills the eye and obliterates all other considerations.

The novel is set in Paris at the close of the First World War and concerns the collapse of a marriage and the start of a love affair. Yet the setting is no more than an occasional precise, impressionistic line; both the collapse of the marriage and the start of the love affair take place beyond the canvas. The action of the novel is the states of mind and the processes of feeling that lead up to these events.

Mahaut d’Orgel is a charming girl with a strict code of behavior and much in love with her husband. The count, twelve years older than she, is one of those shallow, rather silly people who pass for sound characters if no strain is put on them. He returns his wife’s devotion with “much gratitude and the warmest friendship which he himself took for love.”

D’Orgel has a habit of striking up acquaintances on the spur of the moment, because it seems to him socially adventurous. At the circus he discovers a young man called Francois de Seryeuse and becomes firm friends with him. It is characteristic of d’Orgel that de Seryeuse is actually of his own class, although part of a slightly different set, and that they might quite reasonably have met at a dinner party instead of in the Fratellinis’ dressing room.

De Séryeuse falls in love with the countess at once, admires her for her devotion to d’Orgel, and worries over his own hypocritical position as friend of the family. Presently Mahaut falls in love with de Séryeuse and is dismayed by her own disloyalty as well as his apparent indifference. They both behave with complete propriety and neither understands the other’s feelings. It is d’Orgel himself who unbalances the delicate situation by playing the fool. When the crisis finally comes, he refuses to face it and retreats into plans for what is clearly destined to be one of the most disastrous costume balls in history.

In outline, the story is simple, but it is told with such economy, precision, and penetration that it has a force out of all proportion to the visible ingredients. A fine novel by any standards, it is staggering when one recalls that Radiguet wrote Count d’Orgel, Devil in the Flesh, and a volume of poems before he died at the age of twenty.

Violet Schiff’s translation of Count d’Orgel is not all it might be. It is on the gawky side much of the time and includes at least one outright impossibility, but Radiguet’s accomplishment survives in spite of these conditions.

There is nothing awkward about the translation of Chéri and The Last of Chéri (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.50), the two novels which make up the second volume of a projected complete English edition of the work of Colette. The style is suitably light, flexible and ironic. If Roger Sen house’s decision to put slang into British idiom gets too many countries into the act, the American equivalent of “lawks’‘ or “tupennyha ‘penny tart" wouldn’t clear up the congest ion.

Togelher, the novels cover the whole career of Chझri, who begins as a pampered Edwardian gigolo and drifts to a dismal end in the autumn of 1919, defeated by a world in which he no longer fits. It’s not quite fair, perhaps, to call him a gigolo, since money is not an issue. Chéri s mother, an amusingly dreadful woman, has been well provided for by a series of lovers. He gets little attention from anybody, except as a piece of ornamental and frequently infuriating bric-a-brac. At the age of eighteen, he is scooped up by his mothers friend Léa, a charming creature who acts simultaneously as mistress, friend, and mother, and does all of these parts to perfection, having had plenty of practice beforehand. After six years of Léa’s spoiling, Chéri, who never was overburdened with brains or enterprise, is about as well fitted for the world as a Chihuahua lost in Alaska.

The portraits of Chéri and Léa are done with enormous skill. Nothing happens predictably—indeed, the story is full of surprises— but every move they make is right and every emotion convinces. Léa gives way to old age with the theatrical finality of anger, bundles herself in tweeds, and talks like a cross between an Oscar Wilde dowager and Gertrude Stein. Chéri, normally resentful of inelegant people, visits by the hour with a disheveled former trollop who remembers Léa in her youth. Even this old bat has unexpected resources. She goes off to her mother’s funeral and the reader is as thunderstruck as Chéri.

The tragicomedy of the boy who will not grow up and the woman who cannot stay young is worked out with wit, a fine assortment of supporting characters, perfectly chosen detail, and a detachment that has in it an almost feline quality. Madame Colette is really a wonder.

Frank Moraes was one of a group of Indian journalists and officials invited by the Chinese to examine the achievements of Communism at first hand. In Report on Mao’s China (Macmillan, $4.00) he describes what he saw north of the Himalayas, making no pretense to have seen everything.

Since India has studiously maintained civil relations with Communist China, Mr. Moraes saw a great deal, in the long run, and heard even more. He reports in detail, discounting some claims, elaborating others, resering judgment where he feels himself unqualified to form a useful opinion. There is no hate or hysteria in the hook, but an undercurrent of dry disapproval is detectable on every page; and when Mr. Moraes confirms his suspicion that the Chinese arc bluffing about their output of certain machines, he is frankly gleeful.

Parts of the book necessarily read like the same old Communist story (organization of youth groups, for instance, involves astronomical figures in the usual totalitarian formula) but most of the information has a distinctively local twist. Chinese Communism, begun as a movement of land-hungry peasants rather than a rising of the industrial proletariat, is basically unorthodox from a formal Marxian point of view. This circumstance has led the Chinese into extemporization in their land reform program, the establishment of collective farming here and the preservation of “rich peasants” there. Mr. Moraes has some lively speculations on the future of this program, and how far it can be carried without infuriating those who have already benefited by it.

Mr. Moraes has packed his book with information on everything going, from how to run a parade (rules straight from Moscow) to an elaborate listing of Mao’s assistants, a who’s who good at least until a major purge. In between come flood control, economic plans which Mr, Moraes believes will create a thoroughly unbalanced state, education, industrialization, executions, trials, the virtual extinction of the press, and the plight of British businessmen who can neither trade in China nor cut their losses and leave the country.

Mr. Moraes had visited China before and admired the Chinese for quick wit and stimulating intelligence. This time he found a pall of gloom over once-gay cities and the monotony of official party-line opinions everywhere. The apparent change in national intellect depressed him, and he writes dismal vignettes of once-witty friends reduced to conversation out of a Russian primer.

To the questions, Could Chiang Kai-shek recover the Chinese mainland given some help ? and Is Mao a possible second Tito? M r. Moraes answers flatly no, with formidable arguments based on what he has seen of the characters and convictions of the two men. It is interesting that while he dislikes Communism, Mr. Moraes respects Mao as an honest devotee. Chiang he does not respect, on the grounds that the general acted beneath his own capabilities, and he acknowledges that in some matters the Communists are running China better than Chiang ever did.

Report on Mao’s China is fast and lucid, the work of a good journalist with no delusions of his own infallibility. Because Mr. Moraes writes as an Indian, the book has unexpectedly enlightening moments. Chinese proceedings are compared with those in India, Mao contrasted with Gandhi and Nehru. The effect is sometimes startling, for his style lures one into thinking of Mr. Moraes as a Westerner, but the difference in perspective ultimately adds to the sharpness of his observations.

where Main Street Meets the River (Rinehart, $4.00) is partly the autobiography of Hodding Carter and partly a celebration of the New South, with its increasing ingenuity and prosperity. Perhaps for this reason the book is uneven, not too orderly, and not devoid of corn. Its defects are minor, however, by comparison with its virtues as the record of a newspaper editor who has always been either on the right side or trying honestly to settle the dust so that the right side could be identified.

Mr. Carter wastes no time on his childhood but plunges at once into the newspaper business. He had been a reporter for three years when the Associated Press in New Orleans fired him for insubordination and because it believed he’d never make a newspaperman. He retreated to his home town, Hammond in Tangipahoa Parish, population 6000, decided the place needed a daily paper (it already had a perfectly decent weekly), and on indignation, the encouragement of his bride, and practically no money at all, forthwith founded the Hammond Daily Courier.

This was in 1932, when Huey Long was abroad in Louisiana and depression hung over the whole country. No time to start a paper, it would seem, but the Courier survived, although merchants paid for advertising with kind instead of cash and the editor once met his pay roll only by courtesy of a lucky crap game. It even throve on its shoestring finances and a policy of lambasting the kingfish in every issue, for Hammond was an anti-Long stronghold and appreciated the young editor’s stand if Huey did not.

Looking back, Mr. Carter admits to some astonishment that his editorials never drew violent reprisals. They drew pressure, threats, broken windows, and the removal of the senior Carter as trustee of the college that he had helped to found in Hammond. They also got Mr. Carter a Pulitzer award and a series of offers for the paper.

While Long lived, Mr. Carter stuck to his post, but after the assassination he sold the Courier and went to Greenville, Mississippi, as editor and part owner of the Delta DemocratTimes. The Courier was bought by some Long henchmen since no one else would have dared to buy it, the name was changed on Mr. Carter’s insistence, and a fine paper disappeared for good. Mr. Carter got in a splendid parting shot at the new owners, though.

The Democrat-Times was backed by Will Percy, that great and public spirited gentleman whose own autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee, is a memorable record of Southern life. There was money in the till and the support of intelligent, progressive citizens. The local problems did not run to small-bore fascism and feuding in the main streets, but were of that encouraging type which can be ameliorated by the application of good sense and good will. Greenville, in short, was a far cry from Bloody Tangipahoa, and Mr. Carter loved it at sight and still does.

The later sections of Where Main Street Meets the River are largely a chronicle of successes. Mr. Carter had a brief fling with PM and a scrambled military career in the late war, but his main interest is in his own family life in Greenville and the changing values of the South, on which his comments are knowledgeable and loving.

It’s a pity, but inevitable under the circumstances, that nothing in the book’s more reflective later pages has quite the impact of the opening chapters. Not that life in Greenville is ever dull, for it ranges from Mr. Carter’s mixed reactions to his son’s first hunting trip, to the race, arranged by the Democrat-Times, between relays of mules and the Illinois Central’s one daily train, a moldering relic unlovingly nicknamed Old Reluctant. All this is good lively Americana, readable and pleasant, but the days when Mr. Carter ran the Daily Courier on luck and barter, sniped at Long in print with a revolver in the desk drawer, put anything he pleased on the front page and wondered where the next stray bullet from a Tangipahoan feud might light, were something more than Americana. Hammond in the early thirties condensed a hundred and fifty years of history, creating a tension and interest that the orderly progress of Greenville cannot match.

There is a boy-gets-girl plot in 7½ Cents (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $3.50) but it is no more than an excuse for Richard Bissell to wander into a few bars and bedrooms while describing the inner workings of the Sleep Tite pajama factory in Junction City, Iowa. The story rattles along at high speed, for it seems that life in the garment trade is just one thing after another, all of them funny and disastrous, with a strike (over that 7½ cents) coming up like thunder in case normal troubles should ever slack off.

The man who gets the full benefit of chaos with Sleep Tite, the Pajama for Men of Bedroom Discrimination, is Mr. Bissell’s narrator, Sid Sorokin, a bright lad but misguided. “1 had gone off my nut" is the way he puts it, “and taken a job as superintendent. . . .”A plant superintendent has no friends. Everything that happens is his fault, including the blowing out of a boiler that Mabel the office girl says “was put in the day after President Harding was killed. For a boiler that’s not old.”“It’s no newcomer,”says Sid, and sets her straight on Harding.

Breakdowns, slowdowns, missing shipments, temperamental operators, and the horrible Mr. Hasler, vice president in charge of production, all gel left on Sid’s doorstep, He’s a busy man. When he isn’t chasing through the plant to see what’s holding up the Lovers-On-Parade number, he is chasing after Babe Williams, the beautiful sewing machine girl. Junction City is too small to provide privacy for anybody. “Well,” says Mabel, jumping suddenly from the drinking habits of the previous superintendent’s surviving relatives, “I hope you and Miss Williams had a nice time Friday night, Otto Pancratz told Bert he seen you two over at the Sixty-Six just more than hitting it off.”

While it’s impossible to worry over Mr. Bissell’s strike-crossed lovers, it’s equally impossible to resist the amusing detail with which he surrounds them. He has a gift for parody, an ear for absurd conversation, and an eye for the commonplace idiocies which generally slide by unnoticed. Mabel’s explanation of why she is going to the funeral of somebody she never knew alive is a little masterpiece. Bits of chatter drift in from the operators: —

“Well, Myrna’s baby died!” screams one, feeding elastic into the automatic short-length cutter.

“Pre-matoor, wasn’t it?” screams the other.

“ No, I din’t hear that.”

“I heard it was pre-matoor.”

“It was only five months.”

“Yeah, I heard it was pre-matoor.”

“No, five months.

When it comes to the morning mail and the Sleep Tite Flash, the weekly bulletin to the salesmen, Mr. Bissell has a wonderful time and so does the reader. The Flash is full of cunning exhortations to remember flannelettes and Nite-Shirts, compliments to salesmen in South Dakota, elephantine humor, and rambling, ungrammatical explanations of why some store did or did not stock the Lovers-On-Parade number. Letters come in “from the territory.” “Please send me the names of any insane customers who buy number 760 at $72.00 as I have some gold mine stock of my grandfathers which they would no doubt take off my hands in a minute. Anybody who would pay $72.00 doz. for that lousy number would give me a nice price I imagine. Have you all gone nuts in there?" Well, not quite, but close enough to be very lively company.