YOUNG MEN IN LOVE. By Michael Arlen George H. Doran & Co., New York, 1927.

MICHAEL Arlen again, with his old characters in new names, dropped into a new book with the appropriate spring title "Young Men in Love"--that is all. It takes about a hundred pages of very, very polite conversation to get the plot tugged out of port and under way. Maxims are to be found at the beginning and end of each line, and one feels that Arlen is trying his hardest to impress us with his cleverness. I advise him to read some more Oscar Wilde and go back to Armenia.

The background and general atmosphere is again London. The main jumble of the plot starts before the war in Vardon's house at Liverpool. We are introduced to his ten year old daughter Venetia, to Peter Serle, a young man, but already a member of Parliament, and to a uselessly rich Jew. Then we jump to London during the war. Venetia has just come home from school, and Serle, always close to her, is her devoted friend. At a houseparty she meets Saville, a young author, and dislikes him intensely. Six years later, Ysabel, American musical comedy star, enters the book and promptly falls in love with Saville. "Young Raphael," a Jew, in turn falls in love with her, and steals one of his father's diamonds as a present. She refuses it, and the affair is found out. Saville, however, rejects her, and falls in love with Venetia, till he finds out that Serle had once been her lover.

In the end Venetia marries Young Raphael, who is by this time reconciled with his father; Saville and Ysabel are living in Paris, and all the minor characters have conveniently died off. Venetia has always known that she would marry Young Raphael--so has the reader--but the interest is kept up till the end, as the characters at times become so involved with one another--that it takes a long time and even an extra paragraph to end it.

But the book is very pleasant reading nevertheless, though perhaps not as, good as some of his earlier work, particularly "Piracy." Many of the characters are already familiar. Venetia has the flavor of Tris March in the "Green Hat" or Shelmerdine in "The London Venture"; in Saville there is Pelham Marlay, and in the likeable Peter Serle a touch of Lord George Tarlyon. Venetia Vardon is the typical lovely creature of Michael Arlen, impossible yet plausible, stunning and elusive. At least the author has realized the truth of O. Henry's maxim that Bohemia is merely a land we do not live in, and has created appropriate characters, which are a relief after picayune sensationists such as James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and others, who think themselves realists for showing us the disagreeable things about disagreeable people in disjointed sentences. And no one would object to Venetia Vardon having loved twice except the Boston censors, who have banned the book. I am afraid that Swift, Fielding, Defoe and many of our other great English novelists would have made a scant living in this state.