The Confessions of Joe

THE BEST OF INTENTIONS (314 pp.)--Robert Molloy--Llpplncott ($3).

Joe Moreton, 42, earns $80 a week editing the house organ of a big company, reads good books, listens to good music on the radio, and has lately begun to think aloud. His wife Peggy, 41, is a trim little Irish woman whose scruples about birth control have lately begun to complicate their marriage. His children, a daughter 18 and a son 16, are a smart, self-possessed pair of youngsters who answer respectfully when he speaks to them, make moderated replies to his bitter wisecracks, and seem to him to have recently become large, mature and strange.

The Best of Intentions begins as Joe is planning a love affair with a girl he met at the opera. The problem is: how to get out of the house on Sunday without the whole family finding it out.

Who Kicked Butch? With these fairly familiar ingredients, Robert Molloy (Pride's Way) has apparently set out to write a novel that would be to a Manhattan boyhood what A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is to girlhood on the other side of the East River. All the embarrassments and humiliations of adolescence are here, with perhaps a few more than is customary: the pimples, the first long pants, the first dates, the first fights, the first sexual experiences, and the earnest attempts, quickly thwarted, to become a football star.

Joe had a pretty hard boyhood. He wet his pants on his first day at school, and after his First Communion was sick as soon as he got back to his pew. When the little girl around the corner told him that Butch O'Hara had tried to kiss her, Joe said, "Somebody's gonna teach that big dope a lesson." She told Butch. The next time Joe saw Butch, Butch began to beat him up. But something strange happened: another boy got mixed up in the fight and the next Joe heard about it, Butch was in the hospital with a kick in the groin. Everyone thought Joe had laid out Butch, and momentarily he became a hero.

Whose Lead Quarter? The Best of Intentions is Joe's confession, not of his sins, but of his frustrations--the fights he backed out of, the infidelities unconsummated, the arguments with the salesman who tried to sell him a suit he didn't want and with the cafeteria cashier who refused to take back a lead quarter.

The crowning blow to Joe's self-esteem was that the girl he loved in his boyhood became a popular novelist and wrote a book in which he found himself pictured as a tough guy, with quaint phrases and vague literary aspirations. It was true enough to make him wince and wrong enough to make him sore. Readers may feel somewhat the same way about The Best of Intentions. Its artificiality lies in the vagueness and unreality of Joe Moreton apart from, his adolescent and middle-aged embarrassments. The latter may have been real enough, but they are less than the whole of life, even in Manhattan.

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