Corn Grows in Brooklyn

MAGGIE-NOW (437 pp.)--Betty Smith --Harper ($4).

Being born and raised in Brooklyn is not necessarily a fate to be deplored, but it can be dangerous for a writer who refuses to forget the fact. A case in point is Betty Smith, whose A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) was sold to even more people than there are in Brooklyn, was translated into 16 languages. Five years later Author Smith, who had long since deserted Brooklyn for Chapel Hill. N.C.. followed up with Tomorrow Will Be Better--Brooklyn again, but not better. Her latest, Maggie-Now, proves that Betty Smith has still not washed Brooklyn out of her hair, and even for reading under a dryer it could scarcely be drier.

Maggie is an Irish Catholic, the pleasant, kindly, womanly daughter of a street cleaner named Pat Dennis. Pat had left Ireland and his light of love, and in Brooklyn he married a plain schoolmarm. Later, a widowed father of two, he bends his leisure energies to keeping Maggie at home, taking a few harmless beers at local saloons and moving inexorably toward the city pension that is the Valhalla of street cleaners. Maggie is modest. She does not want to leave home because she loves her brother and is dutiful to old Pat. But she does want a man and kids of her own. Fine figure of a woman that she is, she could easily land a prize--a cop or a butcher. But love undoes her; she marries a Protestant who refuses to change his faith. He cannot give her children and does not want her to adopt any. What is more tiresome, especially for the reader, is that he runs away each spring to wander all over the country, returns each winter to endure Pat's abuse and to abuse Maggie's saintly love for him. Each time he does it. Author Smith in effect begins her novel all over again.

Brooklyn's Author Smith almost certainly emerges as the most lugubrious writer since James Farrell gave up trilogies. No doubt some Brooklynites in the early decades of the 20th century lived more or less the way Author Smith describes it. What never touches the book is the writer's insight that could give these lives human importance. Rarely have the short and simple annals of the poor seemed so simple-minded and so long.

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