An Early Death

By John Skow

WHITEWATER by Paul Horgan. 337 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Voices, indistinct, across dark water. One is heavy, asking; the other soft, answering. It is almost possible to make out words. Two boys, wild with the dark, swim near to listen, from the island where they have been camping. As they approach the neighboring island of the voices, a splash betrays them. The heavy voice rages. A shot slaps the water. The boys dive, frog-swim, drift, reach shore, and lie safe and ignorant in the chill. What were the voices saying?

Years later, one boy has died and one man lives, possessed by memory. What were the voices saying? His musings ramify beyond the night swim, caught and made important by one of recollection's tricks, and now it is the whole period of his late boyhood that seems masked and mysterious.

Anyone's puzzle; everyone's novel: follow boyhood step by step, and try to fix the precise instant at which the enchanted became the ordinary. No writer solves the puzzle, which may account for its continued fascination. Novelist Paul Horgan might almost be playing with another man's board and pieces: a small dusty town in the Southwest; a sensitive young narrator who will live to be a writer; the narrator's friend, an athlete who falls to his death from the town's water tower; a rich widow who befriends the narrator and sends him to college; the town banker, the town's batty spinster librarian, the secret homosexual. So many novelists seem to have lived the same boyhood.

What makes Horgan's book unmistakably his own is the quiet thoughtfulness of his words. His gift for precise and unobtrusive prose has sustained him through eleven other novels (notably Everything to Live For and A Distant Trumpet). It has allowed the literary world to discover and then mislay him regularly during nearly 40 years of brisk activity.

It is a quality of hazy sadness that finally debilitates Whitewater. The book's tone is almost elegiac. Everything is over. The reader is not told, but knows anyway, that the narrator's friend is doomed, that the present time of the story lies far in the past. It is all beyond changing. Reliving it all gently and ruefully, the narrator makes no discoveries, nor is he changed by the task of reburying his youth.

John Skow

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