Henry Van Dyke’s second comic novel will be no surprise to anyone who reads his first, Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, of which Warren French wrote that he would “use as his book to show classes in modern literature that the novel is thriving anew.”

Oliver, the narrator of Blood of Strawberries, who is eighteen at the end of Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, is now in his twenties. He tells the story of a strange summer just as he saw it happen, on the streets of Manhattan, in the Chelsea Hotel, at the St. Mark’s Playhouse on Second Avenue. Though he seems self-assured and detached, it is gradually clear that his detachment and wit are a defense against realities he is not prepared to meet and scarcely understands.

At the center of Blood of Strawberries are Max Rhode, octogenarian littérateur, and his lifelong enemy-friend, Orson Valentine; they carry on a fervent rivalry about almost everything, especially after friendships, real or imagined, with Gertrude Stein. But it is Oliver’s white girl friend, Desdemona Schwartz, who sets him straight. She is at her startling best in a confrontation with some Harlem rowdies and it is this crisis, which finds Oliver at a loss, that begins to show him how to come through. When he asks Desdemona, “How do I become a Negro?” the question, colored with several shades of irony, places him at the brink of self-discovery.

Blood of Strawberries’s two themes—the need for self-identification and the need for compassion—are enhanced by the elegant, individual comedy that readers of Henry Van Dyke’s first book will recognize with pleasure. His now novel is, in Mark Schorer’s words, “very funny, far out in its whacky inventiveness, and under all the outré clowning, sad and serious at its core.”