Hope Against Hope

THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER by Piers Paul Read. 276 pages. Lippincott. $6.95.

Piers Paul Read is a young English novelist with a specialty: exposing false innocents. He writes cool little horror stories about decent, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves up to their lily-white necks in evil. Good but tragically unaware Germans before World War II (The Junkers), for instance. Or the rich English boy (Monk Dawsori) who sets out to be a saint, rather as if he were joining a club. Almost sinisterly quiet in tone, Read is a sad, skilled connoisseur of the moral blindness that occurs when self-righteousness and self-interest try to be one.

If the late J.P. Marquand had been crossed with Graham Greene, The Professor's Daughter might well have been the literary result. Here Read has zeroed in on another moral elitist, American style. Henry Rutledge is a double aristocrat--a professor at Harvard and the scion of an old Yankee family. The sort of New Deal liberal who receives $3,500,000 from his parents as a little wedding gift, Henry has been an effortless and graceful overachiever. All that can be obtained by caste, money, good looks, charm and intelligence belongs to him. His home is decorated with originals by Renoir, Rothko and Braque, as well as by a wife who is very nearly as elitist as himself. He stars at academic conferences and commutes to Washington to advise an old friend and fellow millionaire, Bill Laughlin, about his ascending political career.

Rutledge has produced the obligatory respected books--The German Tradition in American Political Thought --and the obligatory handsome children. But with his daughters, the unflawed pattern begins to crack. Though Louisa, the older girl, is as in love with her father as he is with her--a near case of incest--she senses the dry rot behind his probity. Touring Africa, she sees Third World poverty and asks her father to put his money where his mouth is. The radicalizing of his teen-ager catches Henry faking. He begs the question. Like a deceptively mild inquisitor, Author Read keeps turning the screws. Louisa moves on to the Free-Speech Berkeley of the mid-'60s and comes home after being liberated, married and divorced, all by 19. When she begins picking up bartenders on Boston Common and joins a revolutionary cell made up of his own students, Henry can no longer duck his daughter or himself.

Once he has forced Henry's confrontation with conscience, however. Read is rather at a loss. Are the young revolutionaries worth his or Henry's burgeoning sympathies? Read never quite makes things clear. Clouding his own novelist's dilemmas with heavy melodrama, he kills off Henry with a bullet from the movement. Henry dies as ambivalently as he lived. Read has not so much shaped a resolution as confessed that he dare not imagine one. He seems paralyzed by suppressed hope the way other authors get paralyzed by suppressed despair.

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