Southern Variety

SEARCH FOR A HERO (312 pp.)--Thomas Hal Phillips--Rinehart ($3).

GHOST AND FLESH (183 pp.)--William Goyen--Random House ($2.75).

THE COURTING OF SUSIE BROWN (202 pp.)--Erskine Caldwell--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

As usual, one of the leading exports of the busy South this season has been fiction. Last week there were three new books on the market, in three emphatically different styles, each with something to recommend it.

Search for a Hero, by Mississippian Thomas Hal Phillips, is the most successful. The hero, Don Meadows, is a quiet youngster who has long felt overshadowed by his football-playing brothers. Don's father doesn't think much of him either, and that is another reason Don volunteers for the Navy. Don survives training, battle and a wound, and goes back to his home town to find that the war hasn't changed his stay-at-home brothers very much, or himself either. He decides that the real battlefield of life is the self. At 29, Author Phillips knows how to work a vein of quiet realism for sense rather than sensation. Search for a Hero is his third novel, and though it may not be as engrossing as The Golden Lie (TIME, April 30, 1950), it shows an unusual gift for entering the lives of ordinary people. It is clearly the work of a writer who couldn't fake if he tried.

Ghost and Flesh, by 34-year-old William Goyen of Texas, is a collection of eight wispy stories of the haunted-South school. All the stories are gracefully written, and some of them break into prose poetry reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe. But they create a mood rather than people. Author Goyen writes chiefly about loneliness. "The world," he says, "is too big; we lose people in it." Wandering through the lyrical pages of Ghost and Flesh is a variety of lost and lonely souls, including such town oddities as "Old Mrs. Woman," whom nobody loved because she was too fat, "Little Pigeon," an aging loony, and "Pore Perrie," who died from grief because her adopted son did not love her. They flit through the book more ghost than flesh.

The Courting of Susie Brown contains 17 stories by Georgia's Erskine Caldwell, and the stories are at their best when Caldwell sticks to his happy flair for earthy comedy. The title piece, which deals with the courting customs of Southern Negroes, does this. So do two or three stories in which, for a change, Caldwell offers tongue-in-cheek reports on the cussedness of some Maine characters. Caldwell has less luck when he focuses on city people, and when he fumes with social indignation, the stories fall flat.

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