Five Auspicious, Artful and Amusing Debuts

By R.Z. Shephard, Paul Gray, Stefan Kanfer, Patricia Blake, WILLIAM A. HENRY III

First novelists range effortlessly from 17th century Paris to contemporary Philadelphia

THE NEW TERRITORY AHEAD

Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield turned a perceptive innocence against a world that was out to steal their childhoods. But it has long been assumed that they used up the territories of the rural backwater and the prep school. Padgett Powell's twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is proof that they did not. He is in fact one of the most engaging fictional small fry ever to cry thief: sly, pungent, lyric, funny, and unlikely to be forgotten when literary-prize committees gather later in the year. Edisto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 183 pages; $11.95) is an impressive first novel. Powell, 31, a Houston roofer, has all the literary equipment for a new career: a peeled eye, a tuning-fork ear and an innovative way with local color and regional speech.

The novel's title is the name of a shapeless pendant of marsh and sand that meets the Atlantic about midway between Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga. Simons, pronounced Simmons ("I'm a rare one-m Simons"), lives in this area among the palmettos, scrub oaks, fiddler crabs, and slave descendants who speak Gullah and keep the faith at Marvin's R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand. There, Simons says, "I am a celebrity because I'm white, not even teen-age yet, and possess the partial aura of the Duchess."

The Duchess is what the locals call Simons' imperious mother. He calls her the Doctor because she teaches something cultural at a nearby college. She also knows how to refill her bourbon glass gracefully, sit appealingly on a wicker sofa and pass on the literary tradition. Some of Simons' earliest playthings were books from his mother's library; he is obviously on his way to being well read, although he takes pains to hide the fact.

Mother and son live in a pagoda beach house called the Savannah Cabana, a sales model bought from a failed real estate developer who threw in a shack for Theenie, the family maid. The boy's private name for his father is the Progenitor, an impersonal though not inappropriate designation. Simons' parents are divorced; on visits, the Progenitor tries to exchange his son's mullet pole for a baseball bat and tempt him with the upscale life. But every paternal gesture meets with failure or misunderstanding. His sex lecture about contraception, for example, leaves Simons with the impression that the body part in question "is some kind of electric eel or polyp stinger you have to insulate with rubber."

Lines like this do not usually come from the mouths of adolescents. Powell solves the problem of false knowingness with the same narrative trick that Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger used. Simons recalls his adventures of the recent past from new surroundings: the playgrounds of Hilton Head, where alligators are more likely to appear on shirts than in backyards. The secret of his charm is that he is a precocious anomaly looking back on a raffish puberty: "A good gentry tyke in Cooper Boyd [a private school], headed shortly for St. Cecilia Society balls with a million Altalondine Jenkinses instead of talking trash with true Diane Parkers in roadhouses."

Personal and racial relations are delicately balanced and subtly revealed to young Simons. The important lessons come not from the books in the Doctor's library but from what he calls "the whole alphabet of worldly maneuver." At the Baby Grand he learns how to drink beers with folks who have an exaggerated sense of his importance. "The trick there," says the wily subteen, "is to accept a new can when anybody offers and let your old one get drunk by somebody else." He devises a successful "Boy Act," to unnerve and run off "coroners," his collective description for the boring men who come courting his mother, and the marsh teaches the need for patient observation: "If you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or federal oral history junior sociologist ... all the answers will go back into mystery like fiddlers into pluff mud."

At every turn, Powell makes Edisto far more than a novel about budding aware ness. As the boy talks he reveals the South's new reconstruction: carpetbaggers who ar rive by jet from the Middle East to buy whole islands, the latest styles in scalawags and gentrification. Simons revisits Charles ton's old Negro market and finds that things have changed: "Bats, rafters, shale, pee, lead paint, clothes wads, the stuck bar ber pole, chili in open pots, all went to dropped ceilings for energy saving, parquet, rest rooms, pastel, jean shops, international flags waving in front of a deli store, and food described on a blackboard."

As Simons says, "Something is happening, happening all the time." At this moment, Padgett Powell is showing us as well as any new American novelist that the territory ahead now lies in every direction of the compass.

--By R.Z. Sheppard

PHILADELPHIA!

The trouble begins at a Philadelphia construction site when a young bricklayer and speed freak named Leon Hubbard waves a straight razor under a co-worker's chin. The would-be victim, Lucien Edwards Jr., 69, is black, dignified and not to be trifled with: he bashes a metal pipe into the back of Leon's head. The foreman, Coleman Peets, sees this fatal act as providential. He has been worrying for days about how to get rid of the punk without killing him himself. The police arrive and accept with little reluctance Peets' description of an accidental death. No one is exactly happy that Leon is gone, but neither does anybody think it worthwhile to make a fuss over the manner of his departure.

Two exceptions are Leon's mother and Novelist Pete Dexter, 40, who in God's Pocket (Random House; 274 pages; $14.95) turns a random incident into a picaresque romp. Jeanie Hubbard Scarpato, still pretty in middle age despite a life that has "had more sorry chapters than the Old Testament," refuses to believe that the son she raised on her own from infancy after her first husband's death would simply let something fall on his head. Mickey, her current spouse, cannot disagree; he feels unworthy of Jeanie, probably with cause. He drives a refrigerated truck and sells stolen meat at the behest of his boss, a remote functionary of the Philadelphia Mob. Mickey finds himself obliged to soothe his wife's pain in two ways: by coming up with the $6,000 or so it will take for a mahogany coffin and a dignified funeral and by begging his underworld connections to find out just how Leon happened to die in the first place.

Possessing neither the money nor the clout to perform these jobs, Mickey does the best he can, which is not terribly good. Matters quickly get out of hand. Mickey tries to raise money by betting on an inspired hunch at the racetrack, and loses. The lupine director of the local funeral home, displeased when Mickey asks for credit, tosses Leon's body into a side alley.

Lucky for Mickey that he owns a meat truck. Unfortunately for Mickey, Richard Shellburn, Philadelphia's most beloved columnist, peers through his alcoholic fog long enough to become aware of the un sung death of Leon Hubbard, interviews the grieving mother and falls in love with her. As Mickey's luck careers downhill, he reflects on the source of his troubles: "Alive, Leon was a pain in the ass; dead, he was killing him."

Author Dexter, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, piles on more complications and coincidences than his novel ought to carry. What saves God's Pocket from flighty sensationalism is its impressive ballast of local color. The fictional neighborhood named in the title is a white, working-class enclave in South Philadelphia that seems all too real: narrow houses, streets, lives; a place where the Hollywood Bar, the social hub of the area, does "half its business before noon." Some of the novel's best times are spent at the Hollywood. Mickey hears a drunken woman praise his deceased stepson: "He was a nice youngster. He never broke into nobody's house in the neighborhood."

When the only patron with politically lib eral sympathies begins to orate, the bar tender-proprietor warns: "You start talkin' about niggers and America in here tonight, I swear you won't get another drink till winter. You understand?" Such moments surpass the contrivances of plot; surprise fades in the glare of recognition.

--By Paul Gray

LAST IDYL

Childhood, that traditional turf of the first novelist, is examined at a distance in William McPherson's refreshing debut, Testing the Current (Simon & Schuster; 348 pages; $15.95). The slow awakening of youth is noted in minutely observed and somewhat magnified detail, but at a third-person remove, almost as if the author were examining his cast through binoculars.

Tommy, the boy involved, is, like all children, subject to the imponderable whims of the godlike creatures known as adults. In 1939, the year of America's last idyl, friends and family play out their lives in the Midwestern mill town, impervious to the Great Depression and the war that has already begun a world away. Here Tommy's parents lay down draconian laws, then act with well-meaning hypocrisy. The word Negro is never mentioned in the presence of a black steward because "the condition it described was thought to be embarrassing at best and irreversible in any case, and polite people did not call attention to the ill fortune of others, particularly when the others couldn't help it. Their feelings might be hurt."

Through Tommy's wide eyes, most of humanity's sins and sorrows pass in review: his mother's adultery, his grandmother's illness, the pain and death that can attend all ages and circumstances. Grownups try to keep him from the ravages of knowledge. Tommy's mother tersely declares, "We bury the dead and then we get on with it ... Grief is something we carry inside us -- here, get into your snowsuit -- it's not polite to inflict it on others." But there is no escaping from natural law. Tommy learns to place the comforting theories of his teachers and parents alongside the facts of the human predicament as he sees and hears them. The result is irony, a tone that McPherson manages with untiring subtlety and poignance.

Testing the Current has no grand climax, none of the violent turns beloved by makers of films about youth. It presents a state of mind that existed when America seemed as green as Tommy and as vulnerable to the moment when, in Yeats' phrase, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. McPherson, a Washington Post journalist and winner of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism, might well be excused for showing the influence of the writers he reviewed for so many years. Happily, their shadows never appear. The author's imagery and style are wholly his own; from here on, it is his turn to be analyzed and imitated. Given the graces of his first book, that should be an enduring and pleasurable process.

By Stefan Kanter

SUN QUEEN

"I set no limit to my desires," Mme. de Maintenon confided in a letter to a friend. Few women in history have brought that kind of ambition to such a satisfactory climax. Born in prison in 1635, the daughter of a well-born conman and habitual murderer reached for the moon from earliest childhood. By the age of 48 she had embraced the sun. Her marriage to his Coruscating Magnificence, the Sun King, Louis XIV, lasted for 32 years.

When the royal hunt of Mme. de Maintenon was turned into a piece of popular fiction in The King's Way (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 497 pages; $15.95), it reigned for 80 weeks on France's bestseller list. Franc,oise Chandernagor, 38, a French judge, has been more fortunate than most first novelists in the wealth of sources available for her imaginative reconstruction. She has drawn from the writings of two of France's great literary stylists and keenest chroniclers of the age, Mme. de Sevigne and the Due de Saint-Simon, as well as from the correspondence of the indefatigable Mme. de Maintenon, who left behind 80 volumes of let ters at her death in 1719. Rendered in an unobtrusive translation by Barbara Bray, The King's Way recounts in an elegant pastiche of 17th century prose the inelegant scramble among the monarch's many mistresses for sovereignty in the bedchamber. How did Mme. de Mainte non ultimately snag the Sun King? The motto she adopted tells it all: "I shine only for him."

By Patricia Blake

HOME TRUTHS

On a hot day sometime in the 1950s, perhaps the last decade when fidelity counted for more than fulfillment, Jack Henna, an Italian immigrant insurance salesman, makes a routine visit to the Waspy widow of a policyholder. He falls passionately, inexplicably in love. Some days later, Henna leaves his family for a night and moves in, uninvited, to the ram shackle farm of the widow and her resentful son. His every at tempt, from seduction to cooking, fails to move his beloved to commitment. The next morning, resigned to the impossibility of escaping a wife whom he no longer desires and two sons who do not fulfill his dreams of baseball-loving American assimilation, he walks home.

In Anthony Giardina's Men with Debts (Knopf; 266 pages; $13.95), the terrain suits the decade. This story of lower-middle-class yearnings and mid-life crisis has the feeling of -- and straddles the sociological distance between -- Marty and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The ground traversed contains the grit of auto biography; Giardina grew up in Waltham, Mass., the setting of the novel. Even the reticence of his characters may reflect home truths: Henna's officemates have Italian surnames, but they scarcely discuss ethnicity. In time with their times, they share his fervor for feeling American. Yet there are hints of the conscious ness of decades to come: the widow realizes she wants to learn to fend for herself.

Still, demographic accuracy remains a modest virtue in fiction. Giardina possesses greater gifts, notably in creating children who sound and act like children, and in compressing plot into homespun metaphor. Henna prepares a dinner of spaghetti topped with broccoli and garlic; the widow's son bursts out, "This is not what we eat." When Henna gazes at the woman he believes he loves, he thinks, "You are like an open book, always open to the wrong pages, revealing information no one is prepared for." Occasions like these easily give a glum and sometimes predictable story the air of authenticity and consequence, and suggest that, for first novelists, there may still be no place like home.

By William A. Henry III