Pursuit in the South

LAMENT FOR FOUR VIRGINS (368 pp.)--Lael Tucker--Random House ($3.50).

There are four of them--the darling daughters of the best families in town--all young, all restless, all dying for a big romance. They sip their Cokes hopefully, they pump each other carefully, they whip their cars ostentatiously through the streets of Andalusia, Ga. It is all because of the new rector, Mark Barbee, who is giving the Episcopal service a lilt such as Andalusia has never heard before. When the four girls kneel in his church, Rector Barbee suspects they have come "not to worship God, but to worship him." He finds it unsettling.

Social Labyrinth. Angela Madison is the natural leader of the quartet; she is striking if not pretty, and supposed by the town, for no clear reason, to be intellectual. Ellen Terra Rook is small, squashy and ripe as a berry. Hope Stone suffers from having been born up North, but in her literal-minded way she, too, burns with the hungers of youth. Carrie Gregory, crippled by polio, cuts her way through life with her tongue. Different as they are, all agree on one thing: each is out to land Rector Barbee.

The first part of Lament for Four Virgins is a tongue-in-cheek report of what happens when one defenseless minister is besieged by four determined virgins, backed up by four determined mothers. Herself the daughter of a Southern Episcopal minister, Novelist Tucker knows the social labyrinths of the South inside out, and better still, how to get them down on paper. She sketches some neat satiric passages on the relations between clergymen and vestrymen, and plots the maneuvers of her matrons with the skill of an experienced admiral arranging a fleet for battle. None of Novelist Tucker's girls is an Anna Karenina or an Emma B ovary, but all four are distinct, believable and likable. And though they come on only for bit parts, Novelist Tucker's Negroes loll and drawl a pungent counterpoint to the sly, good-tempered comedy of pursuit.

Serious Turn. Alas, Rector Barbee is by no means equal to the chase. He flees to a parish in Montana, and with Barbee gone, Lament for Four Virgins turns pretty serious. Author Tucker traces the careers of her four girls into middle age--Angela into a late, dreary marriage, Ellen Terra into sloppy promiscuity, Hope into money and dipsomania, and crippled Carrie into a solid romance with her doctor. The post-Barbee era is readable enough, but it lacks the spirit of the old days.

Novelist Tucker and her publishers should do all right, anyhow. Seven years ago, before leaving for a long stay in Europe, she drew a modest, $250 advance from Random House. Nine months ago, Lael Tucker (wife of Novelist--TIME, Oct. 16, 1950--Charles Christian Wertenbaker) turned in Lament for Four Virgins. After a close look, Random House not only decided to publish it but sold reprint rights, in advance of publication, to Bantam Books for $35,000--a Bantam record for a first novel.

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