A Big Lump of Something

JOY IN THE MORNING by Betty Smith. 308 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

"Happy," says the heroine of Betty Smith's fourth novel, "is when somebody gives you a big lump of something, and it's too big to hold." Harper & Row has a big lump of something here--genus unclear--that should bring happiness to its accountants and joy to the mornings of women readers everywhere. Fans of Novelist Smith may at first be put off to find that the Brooklyn of A Tree Grows in and Maggie-Now has been replaced by a Midwestern college campus, but the fact is that mythical Brooklyn has merely been transplanted--with its air of nostalgia, its saintly cast of characters and its turn-the-crank emotions comfortably intact. With the momentum of a balky suburban train, Joy tells of the domestic crises suffered by a young law student and his trembling teen-age bride in the first year of their marriage. The two survive because the heroine is "a friendly, warmhearted girl who likes people. No decent person would take advantage of that." Certainly not Novelist Smith.

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