Second Growth

$2.75

IN THIS deceptively slight novel, Mr. Stegner answers the question a good many of his readers have asked — will he progress beyond his early short and sometimes faintly coterie fiction to something of wider appeal? The Big Rock Candy Mountain, his monumental last novel, was a magnificently realized and executed piece of work, but essentially autobiographical, and therefore no firm assurance that he could sustain a major key. In Second Growth Mr. Stegner proves that he can be popular without sacrificing craftsmanship, and that he continually grows in a subtle and sympathetic feeling for character. There is no impatience here, no malice; he is always objective, but never cold. It is a rather special thing, this ability to get on paper a love for the damned human race, sadness For its blunders, hope for its obscure future. The book has humor, too, of the dead-pan variety peculiar to the stubborn and beautiful New England hill country which provides the setting; Mr. Stegner, born a Westerner and now Professor of English at Stanford Universitv, during several years of summering in Vermont has mastered its idiom to a point which makes it seem his native tongue.

The small town of this book is peculiar in that the summer people are for the most part academics, professors from Harvard and Yale, heads of preparatory schools, instead of the business and professional families of the usual summer resort. The town is dying, the farms are worked out, and the summer people provide the shot in the arm that keeps it going through the winter, but the techy, complicated local people can’t be expected to admire the process wholeheartedly. Three stories, slightly linked, demonstrate the split between town and country, between the intellectual and the natural man. The most deeply affecting of these concerns Abe Kaplan, tailor, the only Jew in town, and his strange marriage with Ruth Liebowitz, who came from Brooklyn and had to sit at a separate table at the inn. The town does not mean to be cruel, but Jews are strange, and these two have ideas which can be accepted only by the summer people; the book rises to its dramatic climax in the tragic episode where the town discovers that Abe and Ruth, however outlandish, truly belong there. Mr. Stegner handles the heartbreak and hope in this relationship with great skill and tenderness. Second Growth should add substantially to his increasing reputation.

AVIS DEVOTO