At the Edge of Life

WHIPPLE'S CASTLE by Thomas Williams. 536 pages. Random House. $6.95.

No single sighting gives a clear view of this awkwardly assembled bulk of a book. It is fairly evenly divided between passages that are totally inert and others so good that the eyes sting and the mind refuses to be eased.

The author put huge difficulties in the way of his intention, which is simply to tell about the family of Harvey Whipple, a New Hampshire businessman, from the beginning of World War II through the first postwar years. He hit upon the unfortunate scheme of writing what seem to be fragments of separate novels about each member of the family and then cobbling the pieces together. There are simply too many pieces; the family includes, besides Whipple and his wife, three teen-age sons and a daughter, a young girl boarder and a cat. The human characters are led through the loss of virginity or an equivalent test of patience; the cat is honored with a long, agonizing and very well-written death scene.

The well-wrought fragments never quite manage to give the book a consistent motion. What is good, however, is very good indeed. Horace Whipple, Harvey's youngest son, is a gentle, strong, intelligent 14-year-old, but he seems condemned, by some inexplicable self-hatred, to a condition of permanent, sickening clumsiness. He knocks things over, breaks them, hurts himself. "In the kitchen he was carefully watched, and at the Whipples' round dining table, the chairs were always arranged so that Horace's arc of space was several degrees wider than the others'." With a few simple and subtle strokes, the author shows that Horace is not funny, as he seemed at first, or merely lovable, as he seemed next, but a boy who has stumbled to the very edge of sanity--and of life.

As things turn out, Horace dwindles into one of the author's plot devices. He kills a man and is hunted by a posse in a series of scenes that are not good Williams but bad Faulkner. This is disappointing, but perhaps not important. The counterfeit Faulkner fades, and Horace stays stingingly in the mind, along with much else from Williams' uneven but intriguing fourth novel.

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