Father & Son

THE YOUNG MAY MOON (320 pp.)--P. H. Newby--Knopf ($3).

At a time when U.S. literary pickings are pretty thin, a steady trickle of good fiction keeps coming from Britain. With some notable exceptions, e.g., Graham Greene's theological thrillers and Joyce Gary's lusty picaresques, much of the British work seems remarkably alike in its strengths and weaknesses. Typically, it deals with delicate crises in the lives of ordinary folk, it rocks along with a suggestion of kindly irony, and it is written with a high polish that U.S. writers never achieve. But it also seems determinedly unambitious, self-consciously shy of mystery or passion.

One of the ablest craftsmen in this modest vein is 32-year-old, Sussex-born P. H. (for Percy Howard) Newby, who is little known in the U.S., but highly regarded at home. His new novel, The Young May Moon, is so neatly constructed and so quietly effective in the flow of its prose that until the very end it seems more substantial than it actually is.

Why Uncle Adrian? The Young May Moon is the story of a 15-year-old boy's unhappiness when his mother dies and his father temporarily deserts him. For young Philip Rice, the death of his mother is a matter of simple grief. For his father, Alec Rice, the death has another aspect: he feels inner relief at being free of a "dictator who rarely raised her voice and never threw a saucepan." Alec chucks his truck driving, drifts off on a holiday after shipping Philip to his Uncle Adrian, a baker in Wales.

While the father is escaping from his troubles in a country pub, the son stores up anxieties. Why has his father deserted him? Why is it Uncle Adrian, and not his father, who breaks the shocking news that the buried woman was really his stepmother and that Philip's own mother was an unfaithful first wife?

Uncle Adrian gives the brooding boy new things to think about; he teaches Philip the mysteries of baking, tells him the family stories, and treats him with warm and raffish camaraderie. In the end, a subdued Alec turns up to make amends to his son, and Philip accepts him with the simple, sufficient statement: "You're my father."

Chalk & Cornfields. This humane little story is fortified with homely scenes: Uncle Adrian tippling a bit or sinking his hands lovingly into dough, Philip teasing the baker's lovesick apprentice. Novelist Newby has a fine ear for simple speech ("The tongue is the waterspout of the heart," declaims Uncle Adrian, "and if you let it get clogged your heart'll bust"). He writes with poetic affection for the countryside: "It was chalk country. Except where the trees stood in neat clumps upon the hills and where a belt of cornfields crept up among the contours, the turf and tilth were thin upon the rock. Cut this country anywhere in lane or ditch and it bled white."

But the best thing about The Young May Moon is that Novelist Newby, like fellow English Novelists Henry Green and William Sansom, writes about his people with fraternal warmth and no condescension. Unlike those "proletarian" and naturalist novelists who are so shaken with mission that they make their workers or sharecroppers into faceless morons, Newby knows that a truck driver can be a man of sensitivity and a baker a man of imagination.

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