Alabama Brothers

THE TALLONS--William March--Ran-dom House ($2.50).

At the edge of the little Alabama sawmill town of Hodgetown. Jim and Andrew Tallon grew up in a situation that was set like a time-bomb for some future explosion. Andrew was a powerful, slow-minded, poetic young man who had been laughed at throughout his boyhood because of his harelip and crippled speech. Jim was a wiry, passionate young mill-hand who had defended Andrew all his life. When innocent, Georgia-born Myrtle Bickerstaff came to town and was paired with Andrew at a church social, won his pathetic devotion and fell in love with his brother, she provided the one element needed to complete the Tallons' tragedy.

The fuse of Author March's time-bomb burns down slowly. Written in a slow, subdued prose that sometimes suggests that of Sherwood Anderson, sometimes that of William Faulkner in his less melodramatic moments, The Tallons is the work of a novelist whose increasingly powerful talent most alert readers will want to watch. Born in Mobile, Ala. in 1894, William March, whose real name is William E. March Campbell, published his first novel, Company K, three years ago, followed it with a strong but uneven study of the psychological effects of a lynching in Come in at the Door. Educated at the University of Alabama, Author March served in the U. S. Marine Corps during the War, got a job with Waterman Steamship Corp. when he was demobilized, traveled over the line for the next ten years, is now vice president of the company stationed in London.

Suggesting little of its author's cosmopolitan experience and business success, The Tallons reaches its climax when Myrtle learns that she can capture Jim Tallon's attention by making fun of his brother's love for her. To buy relief from her mockery of Andrew, Jim is attentive to her, grows more entangled, eventually marries her. But as he watches her with his brother he begins to believe that they have both tricked him, becomes insanely jealous of a woman he does not love, plunges into wild dissipation, beats his wife until his confusions are ended when Andrew kills him with his bare hands.

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