The Reynolds Girls

A FAMILY ROMANCE (252 pp.)--Elizabeth Pallet--New Directions ($2.50).

One of the minor literary phenomena of the '40s was the rise of the utterly self-assured, or cold-poached-eye school of female novelists. Such gifted writers as Mary McCarthy (The Oasis) and Jean

Stafford (Boston Adventure) command a cosmopolitan confidence that makes a lot of their male counterparts read like sentimental softies raised on Louisa May Alcott. Since the new school is now threatened with overcrowding, it is a relief to find New York-born Elizabeth Pollet enrolling elsewhere with her first novel. A Family Romance has its faults, but they are not those of the self-assurance school; at its best, A Family Romance achieves a rare, fresh tone of youthful warmth and wonder.

Novelist Pollet has focused her slender story on two sisters, Sally and Marjorie Reynolds, who are at that difficult stage when adult independence beckons but family ties still bind. At 23, Sally is the sort of girl people call "delightfully feminine," though they wonder why she doesn't marry. Marjorie, 17, shows more troubling symptoms: a vague intellectual restlessness combined with a fondness for make-believe play with her six-year-old brother Paul.

Sure enough, the troubles of both girls trace straight back to their parents. Mother Reynolds is a hysterical hypochondriac who alternates between self-pity and a sense of guilt about being an inadequate mother. Father Reynolds, reluctant to admit middle age, fumes because his wife no longer understands him. In their own subconscious reactions to the family tensions, the girls go off on rocky tangents: Marjorie into a vapid affair with a college boy, Sally into a dash to New York after her father shocks her with an ardent hug.

The family is drawn back together again after baby brother Paul falls off a cliff. Sally and Marjorie return to find a humbled father and a surprisingly bucked-up mother. But the device of killing off one character to reunite the others works no better for Novelist Pollet than for more experienced hands; it does not hide her failure to make clear just what can be in store for her two heroines once the family has patched matters up.

The best things in A Family Romance are incidental to its story, for Author Pollet is far more gifted at showing adolescent innocence than adult griminess. The book has appealing glimpses of camaraderie between an adolescent girl and a six-year-old boy, of young people carrying on their conversations through blocks of embarrassed silence, of a young girl expressing her innocent confidence that she can take love or leave it alone. ("It's all right to be in love, as long as you don't spend too much time at it.") Though a bit wobbly with grownup troubles, Elizabeth Pollet has a pretty sure hand when she turns to Paul and explores the world with him as if it had never been seen before.

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