The Doom of Differences

THE WEATHER OF THE HEART (276 pp.)--Daphne Athas--Appleton-Century ($2.75).

Daphne Athas is young (23), and so is her first novel, an intense story of youthful anguish. Her title is borrowed from Poet Dylan Thomas's line: "A process in the weather of the heart turns damp to dry." It is seldom enough that novelists of any age gauge the process so surely. The Weather of the Heart gives some meaning to that worn publisher's tag, "a new writer of distinction."

The people of the novel are the inhabitants of a Maine coastal village and a few summer visitors who stayed. The youngsters whose brief love affair is doomed by deep differences in background and small-town backbiting are unusual only because Miss Athas reveals their emotions so delicately.

Kittery Point was shocked that Eliza Wall, a well-bred, teen-age schoolgirl, should run after a one-eyed French Canadian kid named Claw Moreau, whose family was on town relief. At first, in school, she had been repulsed by his rude speech, the sinister black patch over his missing eye, the squalor of the wharfside shack where his husbandless mother carelessly raised her children, the fixed lines of bitterness which came from learning early that he was a social outcast. Later Eliza's fear became curiosity; and as she grew older, sympathy.

Their intense, unhappy childish love affair becomes a public topic, and the moral heat is put on them. In desperation they run away, but are picked up and brought back. Eliza is sent to respectable friends in Boston for a few weeks to get over her experience. When she returns, she discovers that Claw's raging frustration and craving for emotional revenge have led him into a calculated affair with her younger sister. The weather in Eliza's heart has already begun to change: now it becomes cold and bleak and their relationship ends with cruelty on both sides.

Miss Athas is a New Englander herself, from Gloucester, Mass. She attended high school in Chapel Hill, N.C. with the two daughters of Betty (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) Smith, and got encouragement in her writing from their mother. The Weather of the Heart has its faults, mostly structural and obviously resulting from lack of experience. They will be forgiven easily by readers whose weary eyes have lately seen a lot of old formulas passing as new fiction.

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