Reconstruction Romance

. . . AND TELL OF TIME--Laura Krey --Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

Next to himself, a novelist's favorite subject is his family history. It is also a subject demanding exceptional talent. Thus, although family novels are among the most plentiful, a really good one--a Buddenbrooks or a Forsyte Saga--is rare. Run-of-the-mine family novels are likely to hold more interest for fellow members of the family than for strangers --a fault which is sometimes due to the fact that the family is dull, more often due to a writer's family discretion.

An interesting sample of the latter is . . . and Tell of Time, a 712-page novel based on the post-Civil War background of Author Krey's Texas forbears (the family still owns a plantation in the cotton-growing Brazos Valley of southeastern Texas). Here the tedium of the narrative contrasts particularly with the dramatic events in which the family was involved. The Civil War itself was only slightly more violent than Reconstruction Texas, with its swarms of ruined Confederate soldiers turned loose, its bitter landowners turned Ku Kluxers to fight a black army of occupation.

A few months after the war, lanky, blue-eyed Cavin Darcy, heir to a big Texas cotton plantation, goes home with a Georgia bride, immediately becomes a leading Ku Klux Klan guerrilla and politician in the sacred cause of States' Rights. The main story covers the years when Reconstruction violence is at its height. Author Krey's historical background (from the planters' viewpoint) is well informed. But Cavin's leading part is woodenly dramatized. Although he rides with the Klan, is away for weeks on secret political missions, the reader catches him only when he has returned to the plantation and talks with his wife and neighbors about the situation in general. In tone, these conversations are not very different from equally interminable conversations about his generally pleasant and prospering plantation affairs. And since both Cavin and his wife (an idyllic pair) are dimly characterized, the novel's total effect is to make the violence of Reconstruction seem as placid as Cavin's family is respectably heroic.

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