South in Ferment

THE INNOCENT (370 pp.)-- Madison Jones--Harcourt, Brace ($4.75).

This first novel tells of a Southern prodigal son who returns home too late to recover the world he once spurned. Duncan Welsh had spent seven years as a newspaperman in Northern cities and lost an eye, a wife and all stomach for his job. He heads back to his father's Tennessee valley farm to root himself in the pieties of nature, kinsmen, and feudal loyalties from which he feels he was torn by anonymous city dwelling. But in the bustling regional ferment to which Duncan returns, his attitudes seem romantic, antisocial and outmoded. The powerful dramatic irony of The Innocent is that its hero seeks serenity and is driven to violence, strives for communion of spirit and is hunted down as a spiritual outlaw.

Sick Shell. Duncan gets a sense of dislocation as soon as he hits the once-sleepy town of Bradysboro and hears a booster babbling about the "threshold of a new era." At his family's disintegrating tobacco plantation, he finds his father a sick shell, echoing with remembrances of the South's past and pointedly deaf to the whistle of a passing train. Duncan's sister is about to marry a progressive-minded preacher who is less interested in racial equality than he is in evening the score with erstwhile "first families" like the Welshes. Logan, the Negro field worker, is still loyal, but one of his sons has turned "uppity" and fled north to Harlem.

To still the angering hum of change, Duncan listens only to the harmonic rhythm of the seasons, the shrill "kree kree" of a crying hawk, the explosion of hot sun on ripe tobacco leaf. He scours the countryside to breed an aging mare of a great blood line, and his father's death is somehow symbolically salvaged by the birth of a perfect colt. A second marriage of his own turns to ashes when he discovers that his wife is his neighbor's castoff doxy. Lonely and alone, he rides Chief, the young stallion, deeper into his estate where he discovers a pantherish moonshiner named Aaron McCool who echoes the sentiments that Duncan feels: "They got a law for everything now--hunting, fishing, planting crops. Spew them out like buckshot. A man's got to learn how to duck, nowadays, and roll hisself in a ball and sull up like a possum."

Lost Eden. McCool becomes a kind of Iago subverting Duncan's better judgment. When Chief is killed by the neighbor who had enjoyed Duncan's wife, it is McCool who offers to lure the man within Duncan's shooting range. After that, the book moves to its bloody close with the implacable fury of a hill-country feud.

Author Madison Jones, 31, an assistant professor of English at Alabama Polytechnic, dresses some of his sentences in self-conscious Sunday-best. Images that arrest also often manacle the narrative. But in his bewildered hero bent on restoring a lost Eden, Author Jones has found an apt symbol for the current Southern temper, restive and occasionally violent under edicts which seem to threaten cherished folkways. In a fictional amber as reflective as it is rhetorical, he has fixed the unchanging pathos of social change.

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