Kentucky Rhapsody

HE SENT FORTH A RAVEN--Elizabeth Madox Roberts-- Viking ($2.50).

Like her characters, Elizabeth Madox Roberts is not afraid of grandeur, and she approaches her stories with conscious dignity. And in her majestic entrances and exits she rarely catches her foot in the mat. But the grandness of her manner, which was increasingly impressive in The Time of Man and The Great Meadow, has now reached such a pitch that readers cannot hope to come near her without taking off their workaday shoes and donning reverential slippers. Many a reader will consider life too short for such sartorial efforts; but for those who do not, Author Roberts has some solemn symbolism to show.

Only an average-length novel (255 pp.), He Sent Forth a Raven took Author Roberts five years to write, makes correspondingly slow reading. Author Roberts' tricks of style, which include a growing fondness for the ablative absolute, have hardened into a mannered manner that is more poetry than prose. And her narrative, never rapid, has turned more descriptive, more rhapsodic than ever Her people do a deal of "looken, thinken," but spend most of their time "talken." When Stoner Drake's second wife died, he solemnly vowed never to set foot on God's green earth again. And nobody even attempted to laugh him out of it. He continued to exercise omnipotence over his farm, had a lookout built for himself, kept his household on edge by blowing a horn when he wanted somebody to come running. His granddaughter, Jocelle, became his favorite, but she had to knuckle under like the rest. When the old man discovered that she had been seduced by his nephew, the night before he went to be killed in France, he paid her the unwanted compliment of repeating his vow in her favor. But when she had the spirit to receive a suitor who had been in jail for his pacifist opinions. Stoner refused to give him houseroom for more than an hour. But Jocelle went ahead and married him anyhow. Finally she got the old man to admit that he had forgotten what his wife looked like, and he gave in as gracefully as his old bones would allow.

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