Tomboy Sawyer

THE MARBLE ORCHARD (237 pp.) -- Margaret Boylen -- Random House ($3.50).

"What a swellegant day for a picnic," burbles Ne'er-Do-Weil Ned Claypoole, as the platitudes clatter with the clods over his mother's coffin. But for Ned's 16-year-old daughter Lovey, the April day of deliverance from grandma's tyranny turns heavy with foreboding. Lovey, The Beautiful Blind Girl, can see again--but she has cunningly preserved her three-week secret. For sight regained means Paradise Lost: an end to the antic freedom accorded Lovey by the town, and eviction from the cemetery's marble orchard which, blind, she has been allowed to make her private playground. Back to sight means back to schools and parties, and the shrill anonymity of being just another girl growing up in New Hoosic, la. (pop. 11,003).

From the day of grandma's funeral, Novelist (Crow Field) Boylen takes the reader back three years to the day when one of Ned Claypoole's footling experiments blew up and cost Lovey her sight. Red-haired Lovey soon finds that she is a misfit as a martyr. "Being a mean child," she explains, "I hadn't the temperament for it." While mother works as a nurse and father, as Noonday Ned the Oldtime Fiddler, saws away at the local radio station, Lovey is left to the untender mercies of sour old grandma, who tries zealously to clothe the girl in blue cheesecloth and Christian resignation. But Lovey wields her cross like a blunt instrument, tears up her Braille primer, tongue-lashes sympathetic playmates, flatly turns down the great opportunity of being patronized by the local seed king's family.

In the graveyard, the blind girl finds social security. She also meets two human beings who, alone among New Hoosicers, seem wise and considerate: Old Repent, the tombstone cutter, and young Robber Jim, an illegitimate half-breed who inhabits the nearby city dump. When Lovey finds she can see again, and loves Jim at first sight, Jim knows instantly. With grandma's death, Lovey regains the capacity for grief. Outraged by her parents' glee during the sterile funeral service, Lovey tauntingly tells them she can see again ("Father, your hair is horrible"). Lovey's parents hardly listen to the news. Her big moment ruined, Lovey runs tearfully back to her marble orchard and Jim.

That night, as spring rain turns into flood. Lovey feasts on filched delicacies in Robber Jim's rose-filled shanty, feels the first tug of happiness again. Fleeing the flood. Old Repent and Jim take Lovey back to the hilltop cemetery, there assuage her grief with a solemn second funeral for granny in a borrowed tomb. By the time her frantic parents find her, sorrow has thawed Lovey's heart, and love for Jim has helped her to reach again for life. Recognizing that even her parents, though foolish, are fond, Lovey is ready to leave the graveyard for the land of the living.

The Marble Orchard is a deliberately zany book, and Novelist Boylen's bizarre theme is as difficult to sustain as Lovey's pretense of blindness; at times, the writing is as stiffly convoluted as a plastic funeral wreath. It is, nevertheless, a sprightly blend of social satire and comedy --and an engaging record of a Tomboy Sawyer's struggle to find her bearings in the nincompoop latitudes.

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