Everytown

THE EIGHTH DAY by Thornton Wilder. 435 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

For a man of his age (69), Thornton Wilder's total literary output is small--six novels, four full-length plays. But if it is not a three-foot shelf, it bears witness to an original mind and a remarkable skill--The Skin of Our Teeth, Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey are genuine American classics.

Wilder has always insisted that he is not a writer but a teacher. He is both, of course. The Eighth Day, his first novel in 18 years, combines his special gift for evoking what is warmly sentimental in the American character with his favorite notions about the universality of human nature. But where Wilder's prose was honed to succinct statements of affirmation in the past, it is now lengthened and pedantic. His lyrical qualities are diffused, his plot ambiguous and his theme labyrinthine.

Hero-Victim. "In the early summer of 1902," begins Wilder, "John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small mining center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at 1 in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution."

Expanding from this simple outline, Wilder embarks on a meandering parable of Good (Ashley) v. Evil (Lansing), that reaches into the genealogies of both men and their families as well as giving a detailed geographic and geologic history of the region. Ashley is fearless and worldly; yet he is a simple innocent, a hero-victim in mankind's headlong flight from the primal ooze. Lansing is a Babbitt, successful in business, boastful and bullying--a man who stands in direct contrast to the Ashleys of this world.

Slowly, Wilder traces out the threads in the fabric of Lansing's life and his near-redemption; of Ashley, rescued from his prison train by a mysterious band of unarmed intruders; of the Lansing and Ashley children, and their children, until they are all sewed into meaningful stitches in God's (or Wilder's) design.

Hanging On. And there lies the trouble. The reader is only told, usually as an aside, that Daughter Lily Ashley becomes an opera star, that Daughter Constance Ashley becomes a suffragette, that Son Roger Ashley becomes a great financial success. Wherever the narrative demands a crucial, emotional confrontation, the author turns remote, reverts to brief explorations of life's enduring verities; and the reader is deprived of vital particulars. It is as if, viewing events from Olympus, Wilder sees the marvel of life but not the movement. The people of Coaltown, U.S.A. --Everytown, Universe--love, falter, hate, do good and deal in injustice, and carry on through eternity, still hanging on by the skin of their teeth, improving themselves a little as they go. In an old-fashioned mixture of Christian teaching and evolution, Dr. Gillies, Coaltown's resident philosopher, explains that each of the seven days of God's creation represents millions of years and that the present represents only the beginning of the second week: "We are children of the eighth day."

History, concludes Wilder, "is one tapestry. No eye can venture to compass more than a hand's-breadth. There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and the exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some"

By leaving that last word adangle, Wilder presses home his conviction that man's story is unending and that come what may, man will prevail. The thought is unarguable, but its demonstration leaves the reader with characters who are merely symbols and a story that is an abstraction. After visiting Coaltown, readers may want to hop a fast freight to Grover's Corners, the setting of Our Town, whose scale was smaller but whose philosophy seemed almost as tangible as its strawberry sodas. Thornton Wilder remains engaging, thoughtful, a man to meet. Yet in this book, one longs for more substance, more authentic heart, more

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