Parallelogram

This ambitious novel charts the course of two groups of people during a Christmas holiday in Manhattan. Physician Noel Train, his sister Alicia and their friends are attractive, intelligent and socially privileged. Their holiday celebration includes gourmet dinners and champagne and suites at the Carlyle. Val and Corey are junkiesstreet toughs looking for an easy mark. When circumstances bring them together with Noel and his colleague Willoughby, who is also Alicia's new lover, the results are tragic. Caplan is a thoughtful and elegant writer, but in attempting to deal sympathetically with these two conflicting worlds he tries to cover too much ground. The book is social commentary from the viewpoint of the rich and the poor; it is a suspense novel, through the victim's and the criminal's eyes; it is several romances, with attendant passion and jealousy, and it is a tale of old-fashioned medical heroics. There's even a bit of Hollywood glamour thrown in. The result is that characters race across the pages, leaving, for verisimilitude, lists of brand names and quick geneologies, but little of themselves. (July 15)