Fathers & Daughters

THE OTHER FATHER (307 pp.)--Laura Z. Hobson--Simon & Schuster ($3).

Three years ago Laura Hobson wrote Gentleman's Agreement, an earnest and bestselling novel designed as a devastating attack on antiSemitism. It was intended to shock people into indignation, and as such it was directed less to the human imagination than to the bourgeois sense of guilt. The result was that Author Hobson, while furiously demanding that everyone respect individual differences, was herself flattening all her characters to pancakes.

In her new novel, The Other Father, Mrs. Hobson applies the same approach to family life. The thoroughly unheroic hero, Andrew Dynes, suffers from nearly every frustration the modern male can be expected to harbor. Bullied at his underpaid job, no longer in love with his wife but lacking strength to tell her, Dynes finds solace with a woman 20 years younger.

Amid long and ragged ruminations about all this, Dynes learns that one of his daughters is also carrying on an affair--and with a married man 20 years older. Dynes is shocked and indignant. Only after realizing that he is burningly jealous of his daughter's lover does he decide that his own affair was merely a projection of his excessive love for that daughter. Having tumbled to his Freudian fix at long last, Dynes staggers to the end of the book, presumably saved by his new self-knowledge and determined to do better in bringing up his other daughter.

The plot is not very new, and Author Hobson lacks the first-class novelist's art of creating full-sized characters. If there is a larger story in the spectacle of her decent, godless people trying to work out their salvation through self-analysis, she lets it pass. But The Other Father should have a rousing good sale for its father-daughter-other-woman theme and for its between-the-lines message: everybody can live a wiser family life.

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