Bestseller Revisited

THE VIEW FROM POMPEY'S HEAD (409 pp.) -- Hamilton Basso -- Doubleday ($3.95).

In Point of No Return, by J. P. Marquand, a successful New York banker was forced by a business complication to return to his New England home town for the first time in 19 years. So home he went, dipping back into his shingles and salt-spray origins, reassessing his whole adult life and redreaming his youthful dreams before fully waking up to the present.

In The View from Pompey's Head, by Hamilton Basso, a successful New York lawyer is forced by a legal complication to return to his Southern home town for the first time in 15 years. So home he goes, dipping back into his stucco and magnolia origins, reappraising his whole adult life, and raising the shades of youthful loves before finally drawing the shade upon his past.

Pompey's Head is not nearly as good a book as the 1949 Marquand novel it parallels, but it is one of the big hits of the literary season. The movies (20th Century-Fox) have paid a $100,000 tribute to it, the Literary Guild is carrying it into hundreds of thousands of American living rooms, and for the sixth straight week it stands at the top of the fiction bestseller list.

Legal Knight. The opening situation is intriguing enough. Anson Page, the lawyer hero, is living quietly in Manhattan with an apartment too expensive and a wife too intelligent for his own good. He has finally worked up to a kind of wary chumminess with the senior partner of his law firm, and has almost domesticated his fear of failure (sometimes, though, the beast still growls dangerously from the chimney corner). This somewhat nervous idyl is broken by a man Anson Page has never even met--a great and aging American novelist called Garvin Wales, literary master of Southern sordidness. For years Wales has depended on a brilliant New York editor named Philip Greene, who served the novelist not only as friend but as a kind of Madison Avenue muse. Now that Greene is dead, the novelist's wife suddenly accuses Greene of having stolen $20,000 of her husband's hard-earned royalties.

Who can get to the bottom of this seemingly fantastic accusation? A lawyer, of course. Which lawyer? Well--it happens that the great novelist and his dragon of a wife live on a small island near Anson Page's home town of Pompey's Head. That makes Page the obvious legal knight for the dangerous mission.

Lawyer Page sometimes thinks of his old home town as a former mistress--"a sunny-tempered, laughing girl who never wore a girdle." But as he re-explores the town's anatomy, the memory is proved wrong: a girdle is there, all right--all the stays and bones of Southern convention, the shoulder straps of prejudice, and only rarely the snapped garter of gaiety.

Almost Real. Meticulously, Novelist Basso examines the town's tribal customs, ancestor worship and social strata on the other side of the railroad tracks. New Orleans-born "Ham" Basso has done a thorough job of reconstruction. His town is like one of those skillfully done scale models seen in Christmas shop windows, of which people exclaim: "My, it almost looks real!" The trouble is that nothing very interesting or moving happens in the town. There is neither humor nor tragedy in Pompey's rather empty Head--not even a good hangover.

The hero as a young man is aimless and faceless, in love with an equally faceless, eminently boring girl, and finally driven to leave Pompey's Head for no convincing reason. The returning adult hero has a perfunctory fling with an old flame in the big brass bed in which he slept as a youngster: "And when at last he possessed her, in a wholeness of possession he had never known or dreamed, past and present came thundering together." But the thunder is hollow: not for a moment is even the most optimistic reader allowed to think that Lawyer Page will really stay in that Southern brass bed rather than return to his lawful innerspring up North.

The book often has the pleasant, ungirdled quality of small-town gossip, is never bitter or doctrinaire about the South. It also manages to maintain a bit of suspense about the Wales-Greene mystery, though most of it gets lost in such a welter of flashbacks that even Cinema-Scope will have trouble straightening things out. The novel's outstanding quality is its cozy cousinship with a major American literary pattern--the novel of homecoming, of the haunting tie between small and big town. A few of the other cousins in this huge family, in addition to Marquand's book: Frank Norris' Mc-Teague, Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, Glenway Wescott's The Grandmothers, Thomas Wolfe's You Can't go Home Again, and, more recently, John Brooks's A Pride of Lions. Perhaps no other literature is filled with so many revisited home towns as the American, and it may be because the emotional distance between Cardiff and London, or Lyon and Paris, seems nowhere near so great as that between Pompey's Head and New York.

Judging from such books, American writers are a homesick lot. Perhaps they ought to go home more often, but write about it less.

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