Parody in Pink

ANOTHER PAMELA OR, VIRTUE STILL REWARDED (314 pp.)--Upton Sinclair--Viking ($3).

In 1740 a London printer named Samuel Richardson helped change the course of literary history by writing that forerunner of the modern novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. Fashionable London ladies wept till the rouge ran about Serving Maid Pamela Andrews' trials at the hands of her lecherous master, and marveled at the way she held him at bay with moral philosophy or (since he was prepared to go to any lengths of force) by dropping off into swoons that rendered her cold and stiff. Everyone sighed with relief when the repulsed rapist broke down and proposed marriage to Pamela--who of course accepted him, since she was much too virtuous ever to nurse a grudge.

The few serving maids who still exist have lost the old knack of swooning, and novels, which have become as plentiful as internal-combustion engines, are no longer written, as was Pamela, in the form of letters. More typical of today's mass-production age is the so-called "novel series"--a whole cavalry charge of novels built around one leading figure (Thomas Mann's Joseph books) or one group of figures (Jules Remains' Men of Good Will) or one family (John Galsworthy's Forsytes) or even one dwelling-place (the Jalna of Mazo de la Roche's novels).

Nipped in the Budd. It is through such a novel series, the mammoth (ten volumes) Lanny Budd saga, that Novelist Upton Sinclair is best known to the younger generation. Almost buried under Lanny's insupportable weight has been the early Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, The Brass Check and Oil! Most admirers of the old Upton Sinclair have long felt sure that he would never manage to shake off limpet Lanny and re-emerge in anything like his old form.

In Another Pamela or, Virtue Still Rewarded, Sinclair proves his old admirers at least halfway wrong. In this happily Buddless parody of Richardson's famous classic written in 18th Century idiom, Sinclair shows that though he may no longer be capable of striking Oil! he still has craft and subtlety enough to rig a strong derrick and drill some telling holes in the seamier sides of U.S. life. Not that his plumbings achieve any new level, for in Another Pamela, as "in almost everything he has written, Sinclair sticks close to his favorite theme: the way of life of the wealthy and the power that money can buy.

Bolt the Door. In the Sinclair version, Heroine Pamela Andrews is a prim, pretty, barefoot goat-girl, a devout Seventh Day Adventist who lives with her mother in a tarpaper shack in the California desert. One day in the 19205 a plush black limousine breaks down slap outside the Andrews home, and its owner, an idle-rich sponsor of radical causes named Margaret Harries, stops off long enough to whisk proletarian Pamela off to the vast Harries home as parlormaid. Here, Pam promptly runs into the path of Mrs. Harries' pampered, drunken, lecherous nephew, Charles. Like her 18th Century predecessor, she needs most of the rest of the book to convince him that her pure ears are deaf to any plea short of wedding bells.

The struggle is an arduous one, for as the Harries' old seamstress tells Pam, "It is like royalty in England, he will not think of marrying a commoner." "But what is royalty in this country?" asks Pam. "Is it just having a lot of money?"

"It is having a great lot," says the seamstress, "and meaning to hold onto it."

Though Novelist Sinclair puts Pam through her passes with plenty of dry humor, most readers will have had just about enough of her by the time she and Charles depart on their honeymoon. What rarely flags is Author Sinclair's expanding picture of the Harries menage. Its doors are open day & night (Pam bolts hers) to a flow of cranks and zealots ranging from pinks to Hindu lecturers.

Best drawn of the bunch is bored, bulky, candy-crazy Hostess Harries herself, whose fingers ache so much from signing checks that she abbreviates her signature to "Mgt Harries." She would like to divorce her Republican husband, who turns blood-red at the very mention of Eugene Debs, but "it is too much trouble," she says, "and besides, I need him to manage the servants."

Mrs. Harries--and, along with her, Author Sinclair's happy new vein--is best summed up in one of Pam's nicest remarks: "She writes letters to the newspapers and to important persons and tells them what they are doing that is wrong."

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