Occasion For Loving by Nadine Gordimer. The Viking Press, $5.00.
A Fortune In Dimes by Mary Carter. Atlantic-Little, Brown, $4.95.
The Centaur by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, $4.00.
Children Is All by James Purdy. New Directions, $4.25.
These books are set in strikingly different places: brooding South Africa, gilded California, a “dumpy” town in Pennsylvania, and odd, nameless rooms. But in each place there are “occasions for loving.” Our protagonists care less about the sense of place than they do about their narcissistic entrapment and their desire to love others—they are frustrated, selfish, and immature; with the exception of Updike’s Peter Caldwell, they are doomed to remain in private circles.
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