Mainiac

TRENDING INTO MAINE--Kenneth Roberts--Little, Brown ($4).

Up to now the most aggressive U. S. provincial patriots have been the Southern regionalists (Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, et al.). But in his five Maine-grounded historical novels (Arundel, The Lively Lady, Captain Caution, Rabble in Arms, Northwest Passage) Kenneth Roberts has gradually overtaken them. In Trending Into Maine he definitely shows the Southerners his heels.

An omnibus volume, illustrated with 14 romantic paintings by N. C. Wyeth, part real-estate ad, part history, part guide book, all of it unadulterated Mainiac bragging, Trending Into Maine aims belligerently at these main points: 1) that "there are no better people anywhere in the world" than State-of-Mainers, 2) that writers who call Maine natives "dour, sour, cautious, calculating yokels," are dirty liars, and 3) that Maine voters are still the true defenders of liberty, and to hell with Roosevelt.

Half of his evidence is a chronicle of bygone Maine war heroes and sea captains, chief among them Kenneth Roberts' ancestors (already well-known to his readers). A new Maine hero is Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, commanding the Twentieth Maine Volunteers, who later, as Governor, was universally denounced as a rabid tory. But for him. says Roberts, "the Union army would have lost the Battle of Gettysburg and, in all probability, the war."

Trending down to the present. Kenneth Roberts rests his case for Maine superiority chiefly on his vehement dare to the reader to knock Maine off his shoulder. Says Roberts: Maine ducks and partridges fly faster. Maine fish fight harder. Maine food tastes better than anywhere else in the world. But the most ingenious evidence concerns the Maine air, which Author Roberts credits with bringing 75 writers into his neighborhood of southern Maine. His theory is that they go there and write furiously and successfully because the air contains iodine pounded out of the seaweed by the ocean surf. For himself, unfortunately, the iodine is wasted, since he can write only in Italy, ''where I own nothing, don't want to own anything, have no acquaintances, am wholly uninterested in my surroundings."

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