Drawing-Room Tragedy

THE SEASONS' DIFFERENCE (303 pp.)--Frederick Buechner--Knopf ($3.50).

Among the frisky young colts in the U.S. literary stable, 25-year-old Novelist Frederick Buechner has many of the marks of a writing thoroughbred. His style stems from Henry James, his imagination makes such plodding documentarians as Norman Mailer and James Jones look like plow horses. Critical railbirds who clocked him on his first novel, A Long Day's Dying, found that he ran a sharp race with a light package: the havoc of a love affair between a middle-aged woman and her son's English instructor.

Second time out, in The Seasons' Difference, he runs wide around the turns of meaning, breaks stride in the stretch and pulls up lame at the finish. As before, Novelist Buechner carries a minimum plot load, but the gravity of his theme is enough to make him stumble. He sets himself two problems that have tripped up better novelists: 1) to etch the profile of a saint without making him a prig, 2) to make a religious experience ring with the homely authority of an alarm clock.

To the worldly little circle of summer friends taking their cues and comforts from well-heeled Sam and Sara Dunn, Sam's cousin Peter Cowley is a bit of a boob, but useful. Peter's job is to tame and tutor the circle's mischievous parcel of small fry in an impromptu summer school; his joy is to roam off into the woods alone munching an apple and chewing on the word of God. On one such solitary jaunt, he sees a vision, not God but a proof "that there is God, and that we matter to Him.

Very much." To decent, secular folk like the Dunns and their friends, this is as unnerving as having poison ivy or termites about the place. Pressing Peter for details, they learn that the vision was rather like a person, that its message was love, and that they must join him at the same hilly spot for a repeat miracle.

Primed, the children get there first, and garbed in spooky white sheets stage a reverent tableau that petrifies their elders until they see through it. When they do, they are relieved. The fake miracle gives them what they secretly want -- something solid to disbelieve in. Peter Cowley's faith is unshaken. Modern man, he concludes, knows too much for his own good. Too sophisticated for miracles, he must find his way to grace through such hoary maxims as "Love one another." To give that wan truism the flush of a bold truth, Novelist Buechner's drawing-room tragedy would have to glow with forthright eloquence; it shimmers with frosty, neo-Jamesian elegance instead.

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