Ye Olde New England

RAINBOW ON THE ROAD (343 pp.)--Esther Forbes -- Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Esther Forbes has spent her writing career (28 years, eleven books) spading up the New England past. One of her books (Paul Revere and The World He Lived In) took the 1942 Pulitzer Prize in history; another (The Running of the Tide) won the 1947 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $150,000 novel contest. Regional devotion comes naturally to Esther Forbes, daughter of a pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts clan, one of whose 17th-century members died in jail while awaiting trial for witchcraft. There is little witchcraft, unfortunately, in Author Forbes's latest novel, Rainbow on the Road, and the plot is frugal even by Yankee standards. A solid fog of research muffles her characters, but whenever it lifts for a page or two, the sights and sounds of the New England countryside around 1830 come through in a kind of pastoral tone poem.

Her hero is a peddler-limner named Jude. Jude spends his winters painting in the figures of men and women on canvases but leaving the faces blank. When spring comes, he saddles his cart, piles in the canvases and hits up the New England towns for people who will pay $3 to $5 to have the blank spots filled in with their "likenesses." Rainbow on the Road covers one season's adventures on Jude's circuit as told in flashback by a 14-year-old boy who goes with him.

By the souped-up standards of the contemporary historical novel, things are pretty tame. Jude saves a young-girl from making a fool of herself over an old man by doing her portrait as if she had drowned herself, like the old man's previous young wife; Jude flirts gingerly with sex when he meets a blowsy, redheaded tavern mis tress whose face just fits the Rubens-like nude canvas which he almost never dis plays. Closest he comes to trouble is when a sheriff mistakenly nabs him as Ruby Lambkin, a highwayman whose legendary misdeeds run a counterpoint through the novel and, off & on, in gentle Jude's wistful thinking.

Rainbow on the Road's fatter dividends are paid in local types (traveling songsmiths, drovers, eccentrics) and local talk ("She was plump as a little pig. active as sin, awkward as a calf, and not much more legs on her than a pigeon"). Best of all are Author Forbes's evocations of New England in the four seasons. Her book ends in the late fall: "Crows were out gleaning, looking like blown bits of charred paper. And talking all the time -- like crows talk. Far above, the lonely hawk floating. Harvest is over. It is the lone-somest time of the year."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.