Endless Flow

THE HARD BLUE SKY (466 pp.)--Shirley Ann Grau--Knopf ($5).

Shirley Ann Grau's first book of short stories, The Black Prince (TIME, Jan. 24, 1955), was so good that many readers have been impatiently waiting for the first of the "even dozen" novels she hoped to write. But having written the first one, she discarded it. The Hard Blue Sky is her second, and while it is not for the wastebasket, it is additional proof that Author Grau is a born short-story writer. She could make the ordinary Negroes and whites of The Black Prince seem special and even important. But in nearly 500 pages of The Hard Blue Sky, its poor-white fishermen wear out their fictional welcome.

A mixture of French and Spanish, with a trace of Negro and Indian now and again, they live on the Isle aux Chiens in the Gulf of Mexico. The kids run in packs; no one seems to mind the casual sleeping around, and gossip is the bloodstream of social life. When the men are not fishing or working on their boats, they drink and brawl. As Catholics, they sometimes go to the church at a mainland town and give a welcome of sorts to the priest when he visits the island. But tempers are quick, violence is always near the surface, and the blazing heat is the most prominent fact of life.

Author Grau tells of these offbeat, touchy folk with the air of a summer visitor who is too intelligent and human to write them off as simply quaint but not sufficiently involved to look beyond their idiosyncrasies and surface emotions. A young girl suffering from growing pains has a couple of grubby love affairs. A boy courts a girl on a neighboring island, and so freshens an old feud that results in senseless violence. Ancient Mamere

Terrebonne putters around, dreams of the old days and is never surprised by island foolishness because she has seen it all before. And always there is gossip and long-winded conversation that bring to mind a remark once made by Author Grau: "If I get hold of something that seems to be flowing, I can work all day long."

Life on Isle aux Chiens flows along endlessly, and she leaves it just where she found it. It is a pity that Author Grau did not wrap up the island in one of her fine short stories that have the knack of checking a perpetual flow and explaining its course.

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