As a Boy Grows Older

A WOMAN OF MEANS (160 pp.)--Peter Taylor--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

Quint's mother died when he was born, and for the next ten years or so he was hung up, like some frayed little sweater, now in this boarding house, now in that, while his hardware-hawking father took to the road. Then father married a woman of means, and he and Quint went to live in her mansion in St. Louis.

Quint's stepmother had always yearned for a son as much as Quint had needed a mother, and she poured all her long-stoppered love into him. After a time, sure of her affection, Quint began to pay more attention to companions of his own age. Racked by jealousy, and by a growing estrangement from her husband, his stepmother went insane.

This is the story, simple and moving as a child's nightmare, of Peter Taylor's first novel, A Woman of Means. By keeping his aim modest and his voice down, Author Taylor has written a good, if not a major, novel. One flaw: the stepmother's crackup is too feebly foreshadowed; when it comes it is as unexpected and as nearly incredible to the reader as it was to the boy. The boy, however, is a bright little minnow, dragged flopping and flashing out of a dark pool of childhood, one of the most vivid children of the year's fiction.

Novelist Peter Taylor is 33, an English instructor at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, and the author of a book of short stories, A Long Fourth (1948), which was respectfully reviewed by most critics. With A Woman of Means, he shows a mastery of the short novel form, and a small, high-grade supply of creative content. Best of all, he writes a prose as clear as a fine pane of glass.

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