Exotic Pennsylvania

BEFORE THE SUN GOES DOWN--Elizabeth Me/zger Howard -- Doubleday ($2.75).

It is the year 1880, and spring has come to Willowspring, Pa. (pop. 4,000). "The sun, like an eager lover with searching fingers, [runs] penetrating rays into every crevice. . . ." Slowly "the earth yields [with] a sweet resistlessness . . . like the ultimate surrender of a virgin. Hens fly every which way. ... A cow moos and a bull . . . bawls. . . . Lillian sits under a great sugar maple, wondering. . . ."

Lillian is wondering because she is one of the scores of peculiar characters in Elizabeth Metzger Howard's Before the Sun Goes Down, which earned its author, a Florida housewife, more money than any first novel ever received prior to publication ($20,000 from the Doubleday-Doran Novel Contest, $125,000 from the M-G-M Annual Novel Award). Life is never dull for Lillian, because Willowspring is astir from dawn to dusk with miscegenation, class conflict, drunkenness, antiSemitism, anti-Catholicism and incest.

Sometimes Lillian could glimpse the notorious "Widder Woman," dressed only in corset and drawers, prancing drunkenly to the pawnshop with the blanket she had stripped from her bastard son, who was dying of consumption. Sometimes Lillian could hear Red, Lem, Butch and Shorty Clapp exchanging local gossip. Others whom Lillian wondered about include: Lawyer Pettigrew, an ambitious politician who had seduced pretty Meg Taylor in the underbrush; Schoolmarm Fisher, who had a lurid mother complex; Rufe Albright, who frolicked in the barn with fat Fanny Rhimer; and precocious young Gregory Beamer, who persuaded Lillian's adolescent sister to bathe in the buff with him.

Lillian was too young to suspect that kindly "Doc" Field, who was more repressed than most of the characters in Before the Sun Goes Down, had been secretly in love with her mother for nearly 20 years, and even kept a bridal bed made up in hopeful readiness. While waiting, "once a year in New York [Doc] found a woman whose body was slim and whose hair was fair and whose eyes were grey and he took her to bed, and for an instant out of all time he let himself believe that her flesh was the color of ripe wheat."

Lillian also knew some of the less Freudian folk in Willowspring--honest fellows who reached halting conclusions about politics and life. They said, in what Novelist Howard believes to be Pennsylvania dialect: "Maybe this here givern--givern--givernment of the United States was found--foundered by the people fer the people."

Insofar as the novel forsakes pathology for plot, it is the story of the struggle for local commercial, social and political power of two Willowspring dynasties.

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