Smothered Incident

THE TRACK OF THE CAT (404 pp.)-- Walter Van Tilburg Clark--Random House ($3.50).

Nine years ago, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, an overworked schoolteacher in upstate New York, bowled over the nation's critics with his first novel, a precision-built tour de force called The Ox-Bow Incident. Its firm, restrained handling of the problem of good and evil arising from a mob lynching crowned Clark with the halo of great promise. Five years later came The City of Trembling Leaves, a long, rambling study of sensitive youth in Reno, Nev., which made readers wonder if Ox-Bow had not been an accident of perfection. His new novel will keep them wondering.

In The Track of the Cat, Clark again busies himself with the question of evil, but he has switched from the cool clarity of Ox-Bow to a naive, sometimes murky symbolism that gets in the way of his essentially simple yarn. Again the scene is

Nevada, a half-century ago. From the start, in the isolated Bridges ranch house on the morning of the year's first snowstorm, the reader is plunged into an atmosphere of family hatreds and tensions that recalls Playwright Eugene O'Neill at his grimmest. Whisky-soaked father Bridges hates his domineering, straitlaced, Bible-reading wife ("A clothespin in bed . . . Gotta keep drinkin' just to forget the 'normous wooden clothes-pin"). Mother Bridges, on her side, despises Bridges for his worthlessness, his decayed delusions of get-rich-quick grandeur.

Hunter & Hunted. Daughter Grace is a cowed, bloodless spinster who lavishes her love on brother Arthur, a Christlike embodiment of human goodness, an unambitious whittler of 40 who won't shoot a gun. Riding roughshod over the entire family is another son, Curt, a hard-bodied, dead-shot, ambitious, bully who loves hunting and the kill. On the morning the story opens, he is consumed by two desires: to track down the destructive mountain lion at large among the Bridges cattle; to seduce Gwen, the fiancee of brother Harold.

Curt goes after the panther first, bullies gentle Arthur into going along. Miles from the ranch house, they find the tracks of an enormous cat. When Curt goes back to get supplies for the pursuit, daydreaming Arthur is jumped by the panther and killed. Gnawed by guilt, Curt sends back his brother's body lashed to a horse, takes off on foot to track down the cat.

Back at the ranch house, Arthur's return lets loose a flood of repressed passion, recriminations and superstitious maundering that Novelist Clark's meager story structure is too fragile to bear. What happens out on the snow-covered range is more successful and easily the most exciting part of the book. In a first-rate section of more than 100 pages, Curt's pursuit of the cat becomes a thriller with symbolic moral overtones that will remind some readers of Moby Dick. The cunning of the cat, the cold, the lack of food, the growing image in Curt's mind of the panther as the embodiment of sinister evil and vengefulness, change the hunter into the hunted. After three numbing days & nights, the weakened, frightened, half-crazed Curt goes over a cliff and is killed, convinced that the panther is now pursuing him.

Symbolic Panthers. How much readers like The Track of the Cat will depend on how much of Author Clark's forced symbolism they can swallow. Every movement of every character is set down in meticulous, tiresome detail, so that the lifting of a tool or the pouring of a glass of whisky becomes almost a rite, and a wearying one.

Clark writes in clear, carefully composed sentences that command the respect any fine workman deserves. In his pages the magnificent Nevada snowscape becomes almost tangible. But Arthur's whittled panthers, Indian Joe Sam's superstitions and the too-easy, black & white contest of good & evil are too overworked and too overstated to succeed as symbols. The Track of the Cat is a splendid failure in which a simple tale has been smothered in a stew of inarticulated meanings.

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