High-School Idiom

RIVER RAT--Daniel Lundberq--Rey-nal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

River Rat is the story of a high-school senior in Dedham, Mass., where U. S. 1 crosses the Charles River. A first novel, it is a notable success on two counts. It conveys a sense of its river locale as sharply and effortlessly as a good photograph. It also rings true and funny as a story of adolescence.

Ralph Blood, the senior (and narrator), is definitely not the clean-cut type--at least he would hate to think so. He reads Freud and Will Durant and Walter B. Pitkin; when his girl friend tells him she has dreamed of snakes, his eyebrows almost scalp him. His mannerisms, down to the last flickering cheek-muscle, were learned at the movies; he is as full of polysyllables as a colored preacher. His girl, at the start, is Harriet Stevens, who hopes to become a concert pianist and whose mother is in the Social Register. He and Harriet "explore each other's minds," "experiment" in hypnosis, ether-sniffing and allied presexual sports. Their relationship is an unconscious parody of every style in love from "the scientific attitude" through "I-can-take-it" fiction. When they buy a canoe--on money Harriet stole from her father--their real troubles begin. The trouble is over River Rats.

The River Rats are a shabby proletarian confraternity, loosely organized into canoe clubs, whose lives and small earnings are wholly focussed on the floats, canoes, club dances, coving (river talk for necking et seq.} and races. To Ralph they represent that lowbrow, duty-destroying athletic aristocracy among whom most "nice" boys long to qualify. He wants intensely to be accepted as a rat. Harriet, who knows on which side of the tracks her future lies, wants him not to. Then Dutchy appears. A nice, hard blonde, the daughter of a fireman who drowns in the Charles, Dutchy is the essence of river-rattism Ralph is torn between Dutchy and Harriet; he lies elaborately to one about the other; but all his boyish subterfuges fall through. In the end he quits the sloppy vagabondage of the river to go to Tufts. But Dutchy has pushed him almost to the edge of honesty, and the leave-taking is genuinely sad.

For his first novel, 28-year-old Daniel Lundberg uses an idiom of his own. At once callow and articulate, it can make things seem simultaneously ridiculous and touching without showing a trace of the oldtime Tarkington smirk. It is the almost perfect tongue for the self-revelations of a Dedham high-school senior in 1941.

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