All the Tired Young Men

A DISTANT DRUM (500 pp.)--Charles Bracelen Flood -- Houghton Mlfflin ($4.50).

This is a novel about people with beer tastes and champagne incomes. They are the reverse of Oscar Wilde's cynics, for they know the value of everything and the price of almost nothing. They spout dialogue like a Wall Street high-speed ticker, but the quotations mean less. At their best they are faulty reproductions of two old masters, Fitzgerald and Marquand. At their worst they share what 27-year-old Novelist Flood (whose 1953 novel. Love Is a Bridge, was much overpraised) seems to share with many another young writer these days--tired blood.

Patrick Kingsgrant is a junior at Harvard, class of '51, and a freshman at life. His right arm was slightly crippled at birth, so Pat goes out for the football team and damages his right knee. This test of manhood merely inflames his ego; he enrolls in a creative-writing course. A story about his "true friends" and eccentrically named roommates, David Tall Man and Snowjob Porter, convinces the professor that Pat is a "born writer." But daddy Kingsgrant, a Yankee lawyer with a Park Avenue penthouse and a mind like a safety-deposit box, is not so easily hurdled. Pat scoops up his Brooks Brothers suits and heads for a Manhattan hovel to finish the Great American Novel.

Simultaneously, Pat has fallen in love with Anna van Neerdaam. whose ancestors came over with Peter Stuyvesant. When their kissing sessions turn serious, Pat develops qualms, for he is a Roman Catholic and Anna is not. The religious tracts he urges upon her not only fail to resolve her doubts but turn her skittish on the question of marrying him at all.

Readers who recoil from a total recall of basic-training days had better skip the novel's second half, which follows the hero into the Army. The writing here is as concentrated and about as interesting as K-rations, e.g.: "This is the U.S. rifle, calibre thirty, MI. It is clip-fed, it is air-cooled, it is gas-operated."

To convey the mellowness of time passing, Author Flood goes in relentlessly for air-cooled, clip-fed flashbacks. He has a hostly urge to escort the reader to the best schools, streets, shops and restaurants, like a kind of fictional branch of the A.A.A. Persistently understated and overbred, A Distant Drum belongs to the Forest Lawn of American writing where the cosmetician's art skillfully mimics but cannot summon life.

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