Laura Hobson likes to throw light into dark places. In her celebrated novel, "Gentleman's Agreement," she explored the social disease of anti-Semitism. In ["The Other Father"] she explores the personal disease of excessive and misdirected love.

At the center of a story rich in psychological analysis stands Andrew Dynes, to all outward appearances an exemplary, middle-class family man….

However, the soul of Andrew Dynes is afflicted with the "pale disease of emptying time." He is bored by his wife, and he despises his work. By a freak of circumstance he has fallen in love with a young girl….

[One night he learns] that his daughter Peg is engaged in an illicit love affair with a married man.

Miss Hobson handles the complex counterpoint of this situation with dramatic skill and emotional conviction. Peg's lover is no fickle bee. He has money, stability, determination; however, it is not only these ironic differences between lover and father that agitate Andrew almost to the point of self-destruction. It is their similarity in age, the reverse parallelism of passion between himself and his daughter, and the terrifying command, placed upon him not by coincidence but by the "dark logic of cause and effect," to discover and destroy "the other father" within himself.

There's more than psychoanalytical melodrama here. Miss Hobson may not have all the answers, but she raises the right questions about fatherhood. In a story shot through with melancholy and burdened by analysis, she has achieved a dramatic revelation of the complex meshing of human lives. "The Other Father" deserves the attention of intelligent readers.