How Real Were the Virtues

THE JOHN WOOD CASE (314 pp.)--Ruth Suckow-- Viking ($3.95).

To anyone born after World War I, Ruth Suckow's new novel may seem no more contemporary than an old-fashioned Sunday sermon, no closer to modern literature than Horatio Alger. It may be hard to believe that she was once praised as a realist, and that so joyous a literary scalper as Henry Louis Mencken cheered her on and gave her houseroom in his American Mercury. The fact is, Author Suckow has not changed at all, but life has. The Iowa that was her childhood home is still the source of her fictional truth. In The John Wood Case, her first book in seven years, the period is Teddy Roosevelt's time, and the theme is the morality of that era.

In modern fiction's psychological jungle, her homespun plot seems both soothing and revolutionary. John Wood, trusted employee of a land-company, is regarded as a paragon of virtue in his town of some 2,000 people. He is handsome beyond compare, a superintendent of the Sunday school, and gives the devotion of a medieval knight to his chronically sick wife. His son Philip is a senior in high school and is, if anything, a cut above the old block--handsome, kind, courteous, his mother's protector, his school's hero and his minister's pride. Even old Colonel Merriam, his father's boss, sees the boy's virtues, and it seems not unlikely that Philip will cut through social barriers and marry the old man's lovely, city-educated granddaughter. His valedictorian address is ready, full of noble sentiment, for his marks are the best in the senior class. Then comes the blow that tests him, his parents, and all the town.

The fact is that that best of fathers and husbands, John Wood, has been stealing the firm's money to speculate on the Chicago stock exchange. What interests Author Suckow is how the old Iowans she knew so well square the dreadful event with conscience, with character based on Biblical supports, with the responses of common humanity. Some, including old friends, are uncompromisingly unforgiving. Others, knowing that John Wood broke the code in the hope of easing life for his sick wife, want to be charitable. But for young Philip, life seems smashed, and his agony is the greater because he had worshiped his father. In working out an ending to this story. Author Suckow is still the realist who stirred Mencken's enthusiasm.

Author Suckow, now 66, lives in California, but not even painful arthritis can stop her pen. She has several books going, and there is nothing in this new one to suggest that Iowa will ever leave her blood. Wooden in plot and undistinguished in writing, The John Wood Case finds its strength in an evocation of the kind of life that the nation may never know again, a society in which the Bible was a fact of life, in which an austere Sunday dinner was eaten in the presence of a blackboard which bore "discussion themes" for the children's conversation--"Honor," "Temperance," "Reverence." It is worth skipping literary graces and the sensations of the contemporary novel to see how things were then.

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