Wall Street to Mud Hut

COME, MY BELOVED (311 pp.)--Pearl Buck--John Day ($3.75).

EVERY PROBLEM HAS A SOLUTION FIND

IT. By order of Railroad Tycoon David MacArd, this slogan hung in every office of Manhattan's towering MacArd Building. It was not only his recipe for riches, but the nearest he could get to a religious conviction. So when his adored wife died, Multimillionaire MacArd turned instinctively to his slogan and asked: What solution exists to the problem of death? And where shall I find it?

MacArd moved in the direction of an answer when he took passage to India at the turn of the 20th century. One walk through the squalid streets of Bombay was enough to convince him that the Indian way of life was no better than living death. India, he decided, needed the sort of inspiration that had made him and his country great: the go-getting zeal of the American way. His wife had been a devout Christian, so what better memorial ould he build than a gigantic missionary foundation devoted to the raising and training of businesslike Christian-Indian leaders?

Vital India. Such is the spacious plan of Pearl Buck's new novel, which, like most of her works, coolly takes a continent for its province. But her theme is even wider than her scheme--so wide, in act, that better novelists would find it hard to cover. Intricate and twofold, it ries on the one hand to show the great gap that divides American and Indian understanding and, on the other, how religious zeal and hard experience affect not only this gap, but the Americans and Indians who try to bridge it.

Tycoon MacArd's approach to the gap s that of a plain, blunt millionaire. Throw money over from the U.S. side, he argues, and new-type Indian leaders will emerge to invest it. But his idealistic son David thinks otherwise. Money, he believes, is not enough. India may be near to death hysically, but it is vibrant with religious vitality. The would-be missionary cannot convert Indians from behind a desk in Wall Street. He must live in their land and carry his faith to them. To his father's horror, David does just that.

As Author Buck shows, David has come a degree closer to a solution than his father did. But as the years pass, David, too, begins to shrink in stature. His Poona mission station grows so famed that it loses its Christian simplicity, and becomes to David what railroads became to his father. David dreads Indian independence. If the British raj is booted out, who will protect his lifework from destruction? It is now his turn to be horrified when his devout son Ted walks out on his father's seminary and goes to live among Indians in a village of mud huts.

Old Devil Sex. Up to this point, Author Buck handles her material nicely, bringing the core of religion steadily closer to the reader. Then, suddenly, she gives out. The conclusion she wants to reach is that neither dollars nor Christian dogma can bridge the U.S.-Indian gap; there must be intermarriage between the two peoples and agreement that all religions are equally valid, equally tenable. It is sex which prevents her from putting over this conclusion properly. The old devil has hovered on the fringes all through Come, My Beloved, and when he hears the magic word "intermarriage," he hops boldly into the pulpit and converts earnest Missionary Buck into a thinly piping Miss Lonelyhearts.

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