REUBEN, REUBEN

Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1964, 1^st.  Hard cover, 435 pages.  Very good; aqua boards with red and black lettering on spine; light edge and cover wear, spine ends bumped, bit of sunning along bottom edges; binding sound/pink top stain.  Price-clipped dust jacket shows some edge and cover wear, short tears, small losses at corner folds and spine head.  Prior owner’s name on FEP; remainder of interior clean and unmarked.  ‘… nobody knows how to love.  “The human botch of mating,” as one character calls it, is the central theme of an intimate closeup of several interlocking romances, both sacred and profane.  The setting is again that swatch of eastern seaboard De Vries has made his own, but this time seen through the eyes of three aliens:  a Connecticut chicken farmer helplessly bewitched by the invading New York culture; a visiting Scotch poet named McGland, whose quenchless amorous thirst is as sad as it is funny; and a handsome young Englishman named Mopworth who falls in love with the farmer’s granddaughter.’ (from flaps)