That Lonesome Road

THE WORKS OF LOVE (269 pp.)--Wright Morris--Knopf ($3).

Thirty years ago, Sherwood Anderson was writing stories about small-towners who could never decide what they wanted to be. His masterpiece, The Triumph of the Egg, was a grotesque fable in which a farmer, dreaming of becoming a poultry king, wound up defeated, broke and lonely.

Nebraska-born Wright Morris does more than dedicate his new novel to Sherwood Anderson: in an almost filial gesture, he consciously patterns his story on Anderson's work. The locale of The Works of Love is Anderson's sleepy Midwest of the 1900s. Its style is an echo of Anderson's tone of baffled affection. And it focuses on an inarticulate man, Will Jennings Brady, who mistakenly tries to become a go-getter.

Will Brady had always been "more or less by himself," and the tradition ran in the family. His father lived in a house made of sods and, when he decided to marry, advertised for a wife. Will grew up in the heavy-lidded town of Galloway, and settled down to the job of night clerk in the hotel. He did not drink or smoke, and never had much to say. He proposed to a complaisant girl named Opal, who let him (and others) sleep with her, but she turned him down.

The most exciting event in Will's life occurred when somebody left a baby on the doorstep; Will took the child in and adopted it. When his boss at the hotel died, Will married the widow, not because he loyed her but because they were both lonely and she was somebody to help take care of the boy. Success came along, somehow. Will got into the egg business, made money and built a fancy big house. Out of boredom more than anything else, he took to visiting Omaha on weekends, and struck up with a hotel floozie. When his wife left him, it made little difference; he just kept on working and married the floozie. His new wife and his son played jazz on the phonograph all day, so after a while Will moved to the basement.

Groping and still inarticulate, Will went through his years. His idea of fun was to sit in hotel lobbies. Even after he had money, he slept with his socks on. At the end, he was an old eccentric wandering the Chicago streets; he took a job as a department store Santa Claus and died in his red flannel suit.

Despite its last-minute slide into doubtful melodrama, The Works of Love is a moving novel. Novelist Morris has a fine gift for evoking the monotony of village streets at the turn of the century, the mustiness of shabby hotels, the pathos of a man who cannot communicate with other men. When he goes astray, it is usually because he tries too hard to follow the narrow path of Sherwood Anderson's imagination. A writer as good as Wright Morris doesn't need to imitate anyone.

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