"Repent!"

THE WAYWARD Bus (312 pp.)--John Steinbeck--Viking ($2.75).

"The clouds piled in grey threat on threat and a blue darkness settled on the land. In the San Juan valley the darker greens seemed black and the lighter green of grass, a chilling wet blue. 'Sweetheart' came rolling heavily along the highway and the aluminum paint on her gleamed with the evil of a gun."

John Steinbeck's new novel moves like the bus, Sweetheart, through a day of heavy spring rains in the Salinas valley country of California. The setting, familiar to Steinbeck readers, comes out fresh and fragrant in Steinbeck's prose. A few of the characters are fragrant too, but his story, a sort of Grand Hotel in a bus, is cunning and cheap. The Book-of-the-Month Club, though making the book its March choice, has warned its readers: "Mr. Steinbeck . . . may write too freely for the taste of some readers, particularly parents who may have teen-age children."

The Wayward Bus, which Steinbeck wrote in 90 days last summer in the air-conditioned Manhattan office of his publisher, is his first book since Cannery Row, his first full-length novel since The Grapes of Wrath.

Stranded Passengers. Juan Chicoy and his sharp-tongued, sluttish wife, Alice, ran a restaurant, filling station and garage at Rebel Corners. Once a day, Juan in his bus, Sweetheart, shuttled Greyhound bus passengers from one main north-south highway to another. Juan was a dark and sinewy Irish-Mexican whom his wife loved passionately and feared a little "because he was a man, and there aren't very many of them."

Sweetheart had broken down the day before and the Chicoys had given up their beds to the passengers overnight. Most important and most irritated passengers were Mr. Pritchard, a corporation executive from Chicago; his wife; and their daughter, Mildred. Mr. Pritchard was neat, pompous and timid; Mrs. Pritchard sweet, sexless and tyrannical; Mildred hated them both.

Poor Chicoys and rich Pritchards faced each other at breakfast and Juan, more or less for the hell of it, began seducing Mildred.

As breakfast was going on, a Greyhound bus driver named Louie 42 miles away had spotted among his passengers a good-looking girl who "in some subtle way smelled of sex." She had made a living stripping at stag parties for businessmen. Louie had a reputation for making time with what he called "pigs," but though he got this girl into the seat behind him he didn't make much time with her before she got off at Rebel Corners. By that time the first downpour had drenched the valley, the river was rising dangerously, and Sweetheart was ready to start.

Stock Role. Thus assembled for their adventure, each of Steinbeck's principal characters may be dimly identified with a stock role in a leftist parable. Juan is a figure of free enterprise and individualism --sexual, of course, as well as economic. Pritchard is a cartoon of the corpsy soul of Anglo-U.S. capitalism, self-deceived and remote from natural life; Mrs. Chicoy is a type of frank, stupid and violent sensuality; Mrs. Pritchard is The Nice Woman, that baneful figure, whose frigidity is the source and symbol of her other deathly qualities; Mildred, her sulky offspring, apparently represents the healthy rebellion of youth in favor of life; and the. party girl, Camille Oaks, stands for commercialized Sex.

The simple-mindedness of the story is saved once in a while by Steinbeck's incidental touches. His chapters on Alice's solitary jag and on Camille's tired parrying of Louie, a diffident but brutal tinhorn Don Juan, are clever little stories in themselves. He writes with delicacy of the blundering stratagems and satisfactions of an adolescent mechanic called Pimples. But in theme and design the novel is a disappointing piece of second-rate, back-to-the-bulls fiction. Moreover, Steinbeck writes carelessly. Mrs. Pritchard has never known a day's pain on page 64; on page 210 she begins to get one of her periodic, prostrating migraines.

In the end, the bus mires under a cliff that bears the washed-out legend, "Repent." Mildred gives herself satisfactorily to Juan in a barn and Pritchard, repulsed by Camille, reverts to the Pleistocene by outraging his wife in a cave. What the symbolism of repentance has to do with the characters is not made clear. But readers aware of Steinbeck's great reputation and considerable gifts will feel that he has cause to repent as a novelist.

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