Fact of Life

JOY STREET (490 pp.)--Frances Parkinson Keyes--Julian Messner ($3).

"When the final chapter of Joy Street was dispatched," writes Frances Parkinson Keyes in the foreword to her new novel. "... I was too completely exhausted to feel the slightest elation ... I could not believe the ordeal was over; it had become one of those nightmares which apparently has no end, but goes on and on . . ."

Rare is the author who makes an accurate appraisal of personal work, even by accident, but then Novelist Keyes is something of a phenomenon. The happy quip in the publishing world is that she learned to type on a cash register, that hardly anybody can match her at striking the $3 key. With her last ten novels (including The River Road, Came a Cavalier, Dinner at Antoine's), Novelist Keyes has rung up sales of more than 5,000,000 copies, and with her latest she is going to play again the kind of fiscal jingle bells that publishers love to hear at Christmas time. As with previous Keyes bell-ringers, Joy Street is packed with optimism, local atmosphere and an overflowing cast of zestful types.

"Not Just a Lady." The story of Joy Street travels up & down the street of that name, a famous one in Boston, in a narrative streetcar named Desire, or Social Betterment, or Motherhood, or Good Business, or God Bless America--the name changes so often that a passenger is never quite sure. On Joy Street's fashionable Beacon Hill rise lives Emily Field, a young society woman with "charm and vivacity enough to hold her own at a Hasty Pudding Club dance or a Beck [an uppercrust Harvard dormitory] spread." Woe is Emily; these enviable talents are spent on a proper Bostonian whom she married "to be peaceful and pleasant and safe." Poor Roger, she loves him dearly but he is always catching colds and nodding agreement and failing to get her with child.

Then one day Emily meets one of Roger's law associates, a dark, magnetic Jew who kisses her fiercely before a roaring fire. "You're a woman," he mutters thickly, "and not just a lady." So Emily finds "a man who would have been ... a master as well as a mate ... a man whose seed would have been as fruitful as his sovereignty was supreme, who would have begotten a son in the first consummation of union" -- if she had given him the chance.

Not Just Boston. But Emily is faithful to Roger to the bittersweet end -- as, with a faint smile and a last little bronchitic rale, he takes his departure for the family vault. Before he is quite cold in it, Emily is seized in the brawny arms of a lace-curtain Irishman and "kissed ... as she had never been kissed before."

If Novelist Keyes intended this embrace to signify a reconciliation of Boston's warring classes -- indeed, there is internal evidence that she meant it to be a kiss of world peace--no reader of good will can object. Even the sourbellies will have to admit that such an author is a fact of U.S. life as primary and unalterable as the soda-fountain whipped-cream gun.

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