Eliza Crosses Main Street

THE VOICES OF GLORY (469 pp.)--Dovis Grubb--Scribner ($5.95).

Glory is a small town in West Virginia; Glory's voices are those of its citizens, living and dead. One by one they speak to the reader in eerie, faceless confrontation, telling their stories and the story of the novel's heroine, an embattled Public Health Service nurse named Marcy Cresap.

The year is 1928, and Marcy is up before a local court on a charge of practicing medicine without a license. No one can speak of the trial without bitter emotion; Marcy has fought disease with a fanatic's fury since tuberculosis killed her husband and son, and the fury has won her more enemies than friends among the righteous and self-satisfied men who run the town.

The form of the book is much like that of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. Novelist Grubb, a fine writer whose best-known book is The Night of the Hunter, has written this long, impressive chronicle with great anger and great love--anger for the stupidity and venality of the powerful, love for the weakness of the weak. In their testimony, the town fathers incriminate themselves: the rich doctor objects that Marcy is taking money from the purses of honest physicians with her free toxin-antitoxin shots; the minister pompously complains of Marcy's interfering when she tells of tubercular prisoners in the penitentiary. The voices of the poor exalt Marcy: it is recalled that she went more than 20 miles through waist-deep snow to tend the dying child of a miner when no doctor would get out of bed to do the job, that she was kind to a halfwit, that she soothed an unjustly condemned man in his last hours.

Grubb knows the violent legends of the West Virginia mining country, and he knows also how a small American town of 40 years ago could fester in its isolation. But is it possible, this late in the century, to pay off personal debts of anger and love to such a town, as Sinclair Lewis did in Main Street? The immense force of Grubb's writing is flung against enemies long since weakened or dead--boosterism, Babbittry, ignorant refusal to vaccinate schoolchildren. He might as well have written a passionate parable in favor of rural electrification. The Voices of Glory. which should have been a great book, suffers irreparably from too villainous villains, too pure heroes, and a heroine who, if she were to carry that serum through one more mile of waist-deep snow, would surely prompt the reader to burn all his Christmas seals.

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