Why?

THE LONELY (182 pp.)--Paul Galileo --Knopf ($2.50).

In place of a plot, The Lonely has a situation. Flak-happy Liberator Pilot Jerry Wright takes a two-week leave from his air base in England and goes off to Scotland with Patches, a mousy, grey-eyed little WAAF. After a week of shacking up in the Loch Lomond country, Jerry finds himself desperately in love with Patches, desperately out of love with his "healthily beautiful, loving, young, vigorous, clear-eyed, innocent, sexless and inexperienced" fiancee back on Long Island.To straighten out this situation and break his engagement in a face-to-face encounter, he hops the Atlantic without papers, fails in his mission when his socialite parents beg him to change his mind. But back in England 24 hours later, Jerry sees his WAAF and can't resist taking the plunge anyhow: "Patches, I've found you ... I love you . . . Will you marry me, Patches . . . please, dear Patches?"

Letting the sobs fall where they may, misty-eyed Author Gallico (who now lives in England) seems to be trying to explain why so many G.I.s enthused over, and sometimes married European women. Jerry's Long Island fiancee "combined such perfection of physical beauty, flawlessness of character, uprightness, and unapproachable purity that it was difficult for him to regard her as human." What Jerry liked about WAAF Patches, on the other hand, was not only her attitude about sex but "her silences and her presence, because they were soothing. The thing was, with a little mouse like that who wasn't either pretty or popular, you didn't have to try to be entertaining."

Since Jerry's fiancee never walks on stage, readers get no great chance to weigh the matter for themselves. They will have to take Author Gallico's sentimental word for it that a plain Patches in R.A.F. blue is preferable to a Long Island girl in a camel's-hair coat, any old day. On the basis of advance orders for The Lonely from U.S. bookdealers, the publishing trade confidently expects that U.S. women will be falling all over themselves this fall to buy the book, and find out why in the world Gallico thinks so. Male readers are likely to conclude that ex-Sportwriter Gallico made more sense in his unsentimental story of the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, in 1927.

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