Problem Packet

THE DIVIDING STREAM (312 pp.)--Francis King--Morrow ($3).

At heart, Karen hated men. Men should be strong, brave, austere; yet her crippled professor father had cringed before pain, screaming shrilly on his deathbed: "I won't die, I won't, I won't, I won't!" From that frightening experience, the pale English girl fashions her own neurotic design for loving--"to humiliate or be humiliated."

When Max Westfield comes along, she marries him--mainly for his money. Max, a widower, is an easygoing, openhearted American, born to be humiliated. While he is at war, she has an affair with another man and bears him a child. Deeply hurt, Max nevertheless accepts the child as his own.

For the next half dozen years, Karen behaves herself, bursting into prissy tantrums only when Max's doglike devotion takes a forthright husbandly turn: "No, please don't. If it's not. . . mental mauling and messing about, it has to be the other kind." At a point where friends might have recommended a good psychoanalyst, Max packs the family off for a long holiday in Florence.

The warm Italian sun and scene stir up fresh trouble. Karen promptly finds a lean, bronzed soldier-adventurer type who has modeled himself on T. E. Lawrence. They run off together, but Karen soon cloys his palate. Long-suffering Max takes her back again.

In plot, The Dividing Stream adds up to little more than an emotional tempest in a cracked teacup. Atmospherically, English Novelist Francis King, 28, does better. In dozens of pungent little Florentine sketches, ranging from cynical policemen to bent-double washerwomen, he evokes the passion and poverty of the people. Most memorable: two scrubby street urchins who think and move with an artless, pagan ease which suggests that the good life, and not a twisted packet of "problems," is man's rightful heritage.

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