Prairie Obit

THE NARROW COVERING (214 pp.)--Julia Siebel--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

Take away unhappy childhoods and a seething contempt for the old hometown and many a U.S. writer might never have set pen to paper. Still, rebels like Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser were moved at least as much by compassion for their Midwestern farmers and townsfolk as they were by a kind of rage because life was not more beautiful. Their kind of literary rebellion is as dated today as the harsh, shallow life they raged against. That is what makes The Narrow Covering, a first novel by Kansas-born Julia Siebel, as curious and archaic as grandpa's best suit accidentally encountered in a forgotten closet.

Cork Popper. Meet Ella Beecher, 16 years old and unhappy on a western Kansas farm in 1914. Mother is an Old Testament termagant in gingham, a Puritan who never tires of inveighing against sin, fun and sloth, who can drop the appropriate Biblical thunderbolt at the popping of a cork or the inadvertent sign of simple happiness. Daddy, not unnaturally, has taken to popping corks, and brother Joe has married a woman as unlike his mother as the countryside can offer. In rapid succession, the father dies of a stroke after a drinking bout, Joe's lovable wife dies of TB after bearing two children, and Joe steps out to the barn and puts a bullet through his brain. Ella, a younger sister and her mother have moved to a nearby small town and taken Joe's infant sons with them. But tragedy has not softened mamma. Her nose comes out of the Old Testament only to sniff disapprovingly, and Ella's fun is limited to sneak meetings with a minister's daughter where they flirt with the devil by eating forbidden candy.

Ella grows up to a joyless marriage to a decent local grocer. She tends store, she raises her nephews, she keeps house and plays bridge when she has to. But her neighbors bore her, the birth of a daughter fails to enrich her unsmiling nature, and neither good times nor bad, drought nor plenty seem to offer any real excuse for living. Author Siebel kills off her characters with adding-machine indifference. Mother goes. Then the favorite nephew dies in World War II. Finally, Ella herself methodically swallows a bottle of sleeping pills, rinses her water glass, and lies down to die in a final paragraph that is dealt like a poker hand.

Reread Willa. Author Siebel's grim little slice of life has the troubling oppressiveness of a Grant Wood painting. Her portrait has a frame of iron, and within it poor Ella and all the rest do not have a chance because Julia Siebel never meant them to have one. Hatred for the harsh side of farm life is here, and hatred for the narrowness of small-town life, but it comes out as a pathological hatred instead of a meaningful one and Ella Beecher seems not so much tragic as vegetable. The publishers compare this embittered tale with the writing of Willa Cather, whom they should reread. Willa Cather knew how hard life could be in Ella Beecher country, but she also knew its beauty and could record what the hearts and spirits of its Ellas were speaking. The Narrow Covering deals with little except how they pursed their lips.

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