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Perhaps not since Arnold Bennett lias an aging woman of the Midlands been observed so meticulously against her poky provincial background as in ANGUS WILSON’S LATE CALL (Viking, $4.95). But where Bennett made his effects in a pointblank and sweeping fashion, often pouring in large dollops of melodramatic plot, Mr. Wilson’s manner is indirect and unobtrusive, and his moments of high drama emerge as quietly as if they were casual happenstance. Yet despite this quiet tone, his material is more explosive than Bennett’s, for the relationships between social classes in England have been far more fluid and changing in recent decades.

Sylvia Calvert, daughter of a poor farmer, begins her climb up the economic ladder by entering domestic service. While serving as a nurse, she meets, and later marries, Arthur Calvert, who has the precarious status of “gentleman” by right of being a captain in the army. In most ways, however, Arthur is far from a gentleman. A braggart, liar, and wastrel, he taxes Sylvia’s great good patience through the long years of their marriage. She runs a boardinghouse, and then moves up by becoming the paid manageress of a hotel. When the hotel is closed, Sylvia is forced into retirement; what, then, will she do with the rest of her life?

Her son Harold, whose wife has just died, invites Sylvia and Arthur to come and live with him in Carshall, one of the New Towns built as part of die government’s housing program and very much the “new” England to the old couple. How Sylvia fits into this world is the main burden of Mr. Wilson’s story. Gradually, by tact, kindliness, and common sense, Sylvia wins over neighbors and grandchildren alike, and finds that her life is far from finished. At the end, she is looking forward to advancing old age alone (her husband has just died), with a quiet bravery that is altogether admirable.

Mr. Wilson has subtly poised three generations of Calverts in relation to one another, and through their differences of interests and outlook we feel the deep changes in English life that have shaped them all. But it is the portrayal of Sylvia, in its warmth and intimacy, that makes this novel so notable. Recent fiction has given us so many anti-heroes and anti-heroines — characters not worth shaking a stick at — that it is unusual and refreshing to read about a person who is to be admired. There is nothing spectacular about Sylvia except that she is a thoroughly good woman; and in depicting her as such, without any sloppiness or sentimentality, Mr. Wilson has produced a deeply moving story.

MAX EASTMAN seems naturally to have been destined for the role of autobiographer, since he has devoted almost as much time to the art of living as to the art of letters. Whatever he has turned his hand to — love, poetry, or politics — he has attacked with such gusto that his years have been crowded with rich and varied adventures. At eightytwo he is still as vital as ever, and the story of his life, LOVE AND REVOLUTION (Random House, $8.95), is not only a very lively revelation of his own engaging and complex personality, but a valuable chronicle of three eras in American intellectual life — the progressive period of the teens, the literary bohemia of the twenties, and the Red decade of the thirties.

His story here continues, and partly overlaps, the earlier autobiographical account in Enjoyment of Living (1948). In 1911 he became editor of the Masses, which was revolutionary, socialist, and later, when war broke out, pacifist in its opinions. His contributors included some of the most gifted talents of the time — Art Young, John Sloan, Jack Reed, Randolph Bourne, and Floyd Dell — and Mr. Eastman presided as the firebrand conductor of their symphony of dissent against the status quo. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he felt that a new and utopian era would be ushered in. Shortly thereafter, he went to Russia and got to know some of the important officials at firsthand. Out of that experience came disillusionment, first with the Stalinist machine that by 1927 had consolidated its hold on power, and eventually with the Revolution itself, which he believed could end only in dictatorship.

The most interesting pages in his new volume deal with the personality of Trotsky and his dramatic and losing contest with Stalin in the struggle for power. That Trotsky was a great man, Mr. Eastman does not doubt, but he also observed from the first a serious flaw in the character of this intellectual who aspired to be a political leader. Brilliant as he was, Trotsky was of too abstract and theoretical a cast of mind, lacking the human touch necessary to the politician. It was foredoomed that he would succumb to the more wily and calculating Stalin.

Looking back, Mr. Eastman expresses regret that the squabbles of politics drew him away so often from the practice of literature. But the detour occurred so often that it was not the work of chance but of character, and could hardly have turned out in any other way. Wherever there was a fight going on, particularly one that concerned the prospects of humanity, he had to jump in. Even when he turned to literature, he had a way of getting involved in rather violent polemics — as in his attack on the cult of obscurity in the literature of the twenties, and his gibes at the solemnities of the New Critics in the forties. Max Eastman was a scrapper, and his life would not have been nearly so colorful had he been otherwise.

Auntie Mame was a funny idea to begin with, but the joke seemed to go on a little too long. The old girl defying Father Time in one outlandish prank after another got to be a bit grating, and occasionally one felt that nothing was more called for than a good kick to make her act her age. In JOYOUS SEASON (Harcourt, Brace & World, $4.75), PATRICK DENNIS has reversed his formula by giving us a very young character who is older and wiser than his years; and somehow the violation of nature here is more satisfying and enjoyable than the crone who acts like a flapper in mothballs.

Kerry is all of ten years old, but he has precociously sharp eyes and ears for the adult world around him, which happens to be upper-middleclass life on New York’s posh East Side. He is also addicted to what his school psychiatrist calls “oververbalization” — that is, he talks a blue streak — and this explains the hilarious garrulity of his present narrative. Sometimes he misspells the big and naughty words, but he hears them and sets them down anyway. Mr. Dennis is obviously greatly in debt to J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield (even to his hero’s tendency to burst into frequent expletives, “for cripe’s sake!”, at the absurdity of his elders), but Kerry, unlike Holden, is in his way superbly adjusted to his environment. Indeed, as the adults around him get involved in crazy shenanigans, he appears to be the only adjusted and sane person.

Kerry witnesses the breakup of his parents on Christmas Day over the usual tedious quarrels about presents. The divorce follows; and father and mother seem ready for new marriages with new mates. But by a series of well-contrived incidents, the new marriages do not take place, and the parents are reconciled and depart on a second honeymoon. Kerry will no longer be an orphan of a divided home. Wholesomeness and the requirements of the box office have triumphed.

Mr. Dennis is a clever, intelligent, and deft writer, and his tale is amusing and often illuminating in its wit. But his effects tend to become too pat, his control of the narrative too neatly calculated, and his people ranged against one another as such obvious types that one is aware throughout of the Broadway play that can be immediately adapted from his text and the motion picture that will follow in due course. Such foresight and planning will thus give pleasure to many more thousands of people, but do not enhance the strictly literary qualities of his novel.

The teen-agers in JOHN NICHOLS’ THE STERILE CUCKOO (McKay, $4.50) are somewhat older than Kerry, but just as uninhibited in peppering the adult world with their verbal buckshot. This is Mr. Nichols’ first novel, and he is clearly a comic writer with a natural and original gift. College life might seem to be exhausted by this time as story ma terial, but Mr. Nichols has managed to bring it to fresh life again in all its crazy fun and undercur rents of sadness.

The star who steals the show in The Sterile Cuckoo is Pookie Adams, a girl of wild and whirling words but determined will, who has marked down the narrator-hero, Jerry Payne, as hers from the moment she laid eyes on him out West. When Jerry and Pookie turn up as students at two nearby Eastern colleges, the stage is set for their romance. The love affair does indeed blossom, and intensely; but sadly it collapses from its own intensity and Pookie’s unpredictability.

Much of their romance has to do with the problem of getting to bed together, and Mr. Nichols is very explicit about the sexual episodes, though strangely enough his account is funny and candid enough to be pure rather than prurient. Still, there is something a little frightening about the younger generation that goes about the business of acquiring experience with the grim seriousness of an educational program.

Indeed, if Mr. Nichols is an accurate reporter (and at twenty-four he should be close enough to his material), his book is quite a document on the new generation of collegians. Among other things, these young people have now evolved a line of patter quite new to us oldsters. Part of it is a watering down of old hipster and jive talk, but it has also become heavily interlarded with phrases from television commercials, violently and often hilariously torn out of context. This generation has obviously grown up spending a great deal of time looking at that tube. They haven’t entirely believed in what they have seen, which seems to make them all the more determined to go out and discover things for themselves.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN is best known to readers as a master of the modern fairy story who has been able to endow his Hobbits and Tom Bombadils with the same enchanted life shared by older creatures of legend, like Cinderella and Jack of the Bean Stalk. The other and lesser known part of Mr. Tolkien’s career is as a scholar of ancient English literature and language at Oxford, where he was a professor until his retirement in 1959. TREE AND LEAF (Houghton Mifflin. $4.00) is a delightful combination of both facets of this charming author: the first part, a gracefully written and expert essay on the fairy story, ancient as well as modern; and the second part, a fine fairy story about a captivating little painter named Niggle.

Mr. Tolkien holds that the power of the fairy story over young and old alike is not due merely to the relaxing pleasures of fantasy that release us from the tensions of the so-called real world. Such pleasures are, of course, an important ingredient in the charm of these stories. Yet the fairy story is also rooted in a deeper hankering of our nature; namely, the will to believe, despite pessimists, that this world as we know it is capable of being redeemed by some unexpected and transforming miracle. For Mr. Tolkien, a believing Christian, Christianity itself is the apotheosis of the fairy story. For what is the essence of the Christian gospel (“good spiel,” or “good tale,” literally) but that all of mankind has actually been redeemed by an event inexplicable even to the believer himself. In this sense, for Mr. Tolkien, every fairy story, however blithe and childlike in tone, is really a sacred tale, a foreshadowing of the deepest miracle in all history.

As for the tale of Niggle, the details had best be left to the reader. Suffice it to say that at the end, Niggle vanishes into the far-off mountains that he used to paint, but in the tradition of all fairy stories, he will continue to be preserved and guarded, so we have faith, in his journey after the wonder of the world forever and ever.

The anger of England’s angry young men seems largely to have evaporated by this time, and in retrospect the value of their contributions may prove to be not so much their various attacks on the Establishment as their turning their searchlight upon odd corners of British life that had been neglected by the more elegant literary men of London. From JOHN BRAINE’S THE JEALOUS GOD (Houghton Mifflin, $4.95) I was fascinated to learn that there is a considerable pocket of Irish immigrants in northern England, who have certain distinctive characteristics that set them off from the rest of the islanders. These people have been settled for quite a few generations: many have become fairly wealthy or have established positions of respectability; yet they still form an island within an island, not quite assimilated into the society around them. We in America have a voluminous literature about minorities — the Irish, Bohemians, Poles, Jews, and Negroes; but in more racially homogeneous England, the realistic depiction of the life of alien groups is something new.

Part of the estrangement of these “Yorkshire Micks” is their fierce loyalty to their traditional Catholicism, which sets them off very much from their neighbors. This attachment to religion plays hob with young Vincent Dungarvan, who has wavered between the temptations of women and his feeling that he may have a vocation for the priesthood. In his first novel, Room at the Top, Mr. Braine had given us a young man struggling with provincial life in order to get into the upper circles of his town. Vincent’s conflict, on the other hand, is almost solely with himself — a conflict between the austerity of his religious impulses and the troublesome desires of the flesh. When he meets Laura, an emancipated young woman, he falls violently in love, as only the innocent do, and his conflict with himself becomes almost unendurable. Not only is Laura a Protestant, but, to make matters worse, she has already been divorced, and therefore in Vincent’s eyes she is still a married woman.

So far Mr. Braine’s treatment of his story is impressive indeed. The style is straightforward, bare, energetic, and nearly always to the point. The character of Vincent himself, the lean intellectual in his Catholic family, at once austere and sensual, is entirely credible. There are also some fine revealing scenes of these Anglo-Irish in the pubs, in weddings, and in the family gettogethers.

But to get his plot and his hero off the hook, Mr. Braine begins to pull some mechanical strings toward the end. Robert, Laura’s former husband, appears in order to get his wife back again. The action, as well as the characters involved in it, now becomes more hysterical than convincing. Fortunately, just when matters seem to be at their very worst, Vincent and Laura are saved by an unexpected accident.

But despite these weaknesses, The Jealous God remains a very strong and serious novel. Mr. Braine has obviously read D. H. Lawrence, but there is no attempt to imitate the Laurentian style. He has also read the American realists, but once again the influence is one of point of view rather than the parroting of a style. He is very much his own man; and with the present work, he definitely maintains his place among the most talented of the younger British novelists.

WILLIAM S. WHITE is one of our very astute commentators on national politics, and it is always a little risky to disagree with him. Yet with all due respect, I find his HOME PLACE (Houghton Mifflin, $4.00) an unduly rosy and oversentimentalized interpretation of the history and present role of the House of Representatives in our federal government.

Mr. White’s usually penetratingmind seems to be clouded here by an understandable nostalgia. The House, he contends, is the embodiment of the old-fashioned, grassroots, regional, and nonurban qualities of the American character. The Founding Fathers, were they alive today, would probably find the House quite in accord with the spirit of the government they had intended. And if the slowness of the House sometimes irritates progressives, we have to remember that this chamber has produced such stalwart figures from the small-town or rural areas as the late Sam Rayburn.

Unfortunately, for every Sam Rayburn, the House has given us dozens of Charlie Hallecks — or, not to seem to make a party matter of it, for every John Lindsay, scads of Robert Barrys. I quite agree with Mr. White that with the headlong urbanization of American life, something must be done to preserve the older virtues of country life; but the House has shown little disposition to do anything in time about such matters as conservation, water, and soil pollution. The trouble with Mr. White’s thesis is that with the great shift of people to the cities, the nonurban areas tend to be the place not of the stalwart grass-roots rustic in overalls, but of the country set in their Madras jackets, whose interest in the land is negligible except where it touches their own narrow interests.