No Transfusion

THE WHOLE ARMOR (334 pp.)--Faith Baldwin--Rinehart ($3).

When a writer with the nationwide, 30-year following of Faith Baldwin announces that her new novel has her "life's blood" in it (TIME, Jan. 29), the news calls for a certain amount of pricking up of ears. With the publication of The Whole Armor, ears can be at ease. Like the 60-odd Baldwin novels that have preceded it, this earnest story of a young Manhattan minister's search for maturity has a pretty thin hemoglobin content.

Hero Paul Lennox is strong on good works and good looks, A dynamic young fellow, he is modern enough to insist that a gymnasium and round-table marriage counseling are necessary supplements to his central message of God's grace. Yet Paul is beset by a corroding sense of failure. He feuds with an important parishioner, can't wholeheartedly accept the girl he loves, fails miserably as an example to his heavy-drinking young half brother. It takes most of the book and a crippling attack of polio to make Paul understand his failure in life: he has everything a minister needs but humility; his faith has been not in God but in himself.

Author Baldwin has tackled a compelling theme, but the bestselling writing habits of a lifetime will not down. In a few final, banal pages, Paul becomes a mature man, a whole minister, and gets his girl besides (Alcoholics Anonymous has straightened out his dipso brother). In a foreword, Author Baldwin hopes that at least "one reader" will experience "pleasure in reading Paul's story." On the record (some 10,000,000 sales of her novels in all editions), she can't miss.

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