Mixed Fiction

THE SUNKEN GARDEN, by Douglass Wallop (254 pp.; Norton; $3.50), spins this sudsy question in the novelistic washer: Will the seven-year itch spoil the successful marriage of Tom Forester, boy adman? Author Wallop is noted for his 1954 crystal-gazing novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (later the hit musical Damn Yankees), in which he showed how the Devil, with an assist from a Washington Senator outfielder, could raise hob in a baseball stadium; now he shows how the devil in the flesh complicates family life in the Madison Avenue set.

Tom and Janice Forester are contented with each other, their eleven-year-old daughter Polly and fate--that difficult headwaiter whom they have charmed into giving them the best table. Janice is a healthy model of housewifely efficiency. Tom is a grey flannel suitor of success who has $14,000 a year and the boss's ear to show for his efforts. His boss is a sexurbanite who keeps adding fresh blonde codicils to his own tattered, 30-year-old marriage contract. It is at the bottom of the boss's sunken garden that Tom meets Louise, an exotic fragment of brunette poetry. Over cocktails, it turns out that her beefy husband is Tom's dentist. Tom and Louise lark off for a weekend together and get found out. In one of the more bloodcurdling scenes in recent fiction, the cuckolded dentist, drill in hand, hovers over Tom ready to extract a moment of truth.

Author Wallop starts with the old yet not indefensible notion that monogamy is the ideal rather than the natural state of man. But he might have given his story the bite of reality if he had teethed on anything but slick paper.

GLENPORT, ILLINOIS, by Paul Darcy Boles (424 pp.; Mocm/7/on; $4.95), may remind readers that oldtime dispensers of sweetness and light like Gene Stratton Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost) and Grace Livingston Hill (Rainbow Cottage, Happiness Hill) at least put heart into their hokum. Paul Darcy Boles merely puts hokum into the heart. The Grayleafs are newcomers to Glenport, 111., a whistle stop near Chicago. It is 1929, and Ave Grayleaf, the father, is a baker, as busy and happy as all the seven dwarfs. Homespun Ave has the American flag tattooed on his right arm and a bad case of the verbal staggers: "If I don't rockabye now I'll be fit for naught but the ravens in the dawn." Mama is as p'ain as an apron and just as happily inoffensive. As the growing apple on the Grayleaf tree, eleven-year-old Tone is sprayed with the customary disinfecting bromides.

Inevitably he nuzzles at puppy love. The girl Wanda has "elfin-upslanting eyes" and "wheaten lashes," and when Tone is near, she deep-breathes like "a deer chased by dogs." An older woman, a German, finally initiates Tone in the mysteries of sex ("Aber Gott . . . you are so young'1). Meanwhile Author Boles unravels a skein of subplots. Readers will find themselves aging rather more rapidly than Tone, who keeps himself in shape by doing knee-bends in moments of crisis and repeating that everything is "mighty very fine." The same cannot be said of Author Boles's novel, but it does tell a story with authentic local color--and it sure is "mighty very" wholesome.

TENDER VICTORY, by Taylor Caldwell (422 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $3.95), on Page One takes the reader to the rectory of a rich old New York church. On Page Two, the rectory is described: "The library walls glimmered with so many sedate and profound books that the general effect was depressing . . . Why could not religious books speak of happiness and joy and gaiety? . . . Why could they not have ... more attractive bindings, sparkling, here and there, with a touch of interesting orange or rose or gilt?"

Before long, Author Caldwell's 17th novel (bound in sparkling cerise and saffron and blue) spreads enough happiness, joy and gaiety to shake the most depressing calfbound theologian. The jacket shows a prehensible blonde massaging the shoulders of a Robert Taylor type, while in the background are a white clapboard church and a kiddy on a tricycle--and that just about sums up the story. At the end of World War II, the Rev. John ("Johnny" to the reader) Fletcher is a chaplain fresh from the E.T.O. He is so guileless a Christian that the fuddy-duddy characters meeting in that book-crammed rectory will not give him the posh New York parish; the best he can get is a coal town in the Poconos. In Barryfield, his best friends are the local rabbi, the Catholic priest and a "crusty," lovable old doctor. His enemies are local conservatives and in famous Communists who burn his house down. He defeats them all by rescuing three doomed men from a collapsing coal mine, and winning the wicked Communist's daughter. In the course of her story, Author Caldwell makes many points which are pro-angel and anti-sin, e.g., do not throw stones at the preacher; he is doing his best. The reader can only wriggle in embarrassment for good things embarrassingly said--but an estimated 100,000 will buy the book without a wriggle.

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