Insects Chirming

THE VARMINTS (287 pp.)--Peggy Bennett--Knopf ($2.50).

"The nights in the spring of 1939 fell with an epic quality of warm air and light-headedness and sap swimming and voluptuous dreaming. The Samsonic day lost its locks to the beguiling Deliahlike night. A dark down hued her epidermis, but the male day, with its redheaded brilliance and reeking strength, was subdued by her, and her charms held the insects chirming. . . ."

Elsewhere in this first novel by 21-year-old Peggy Bennett of Apalachicola, Fla. there is still more hair-raising prose. The story, probably more or less autobiographical, is that of three children (the varmints) who grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in a town like Apalachicola. Author Bennett describes their environment sympathetically, and now & then probes their moods with humor and delicate skill. But more often she assaults her readers with rhetoric ("0 God, what jubilance, exuberance, terror and pain"), plagues them with questions ("What is love? . . . What are you, Pivot?"), emotes, postures, harangues.

Enormously earnest and energetic, The Varmints is also enormously overwritten, and naive. Walt Whitman might have tried a novel like this at 21, had he been born a girl and been exposed to the heat of Freud, Faulkner, Dos Passes, Fannie Hurst and Gulf Coast Florida.

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