New American Tragedy

HOME FROM THE HILL (312 pp.)--William Humphrey--Knopf ($3.95).

Sooner or later the genuine novelist discovers that his bread and butter depends on the quiet desperations that lie imbedded in the lives of most men and women. How he handles them is one measure of his worth. Texas-born William Humphrey, 33, has learned his lesson early. Alongside a fine book of short stories (The Last Husband and Other Stories), he can now place a first novel that shows how extraordinary the ordinary can be. Home from the Hill tells a story that will be largely familiar to every small-towner. What takes it well beyond village gossip and to a fairly high fictional level is Author Humphrey's knack for turning the feelings and motives of his characters this way and that, until each has taken an unshakable hold on the reader's interest.

Wade Hunnicutt is the big man and big landowner of his county in Texas. He rates first not merely by virtue of wealth, but because he is the best hunter, the most responsible citizen, the man whose word commands immediate respect. Yet, at the same time, everyone suspects the truth about Wade and Hannah Hunnicutt's marriage--that he has slept with just about every other woman in the county. He has a preference for married women, and altogether too many youngsters in the town are dead ringers for Wade Hunnicutt. All this his wife Hannah knows, as well as the whittlers down on the square. Now she lives for two things: to raise her son Theron nobly, while deepening his love for her, and to nourish the son's respect for his errant father as a matter of pride and principle.

Young Hunnicutt learns about his father's extramarital reputation the hard way when the girl he loves is kept away from him by her prudish father. Gradually Theron learns or senses nearly everything that has poisoned the lives of his parents, and Home from the Hill becomes a sad record of innocent youth brutally awakened to the fears, hatreds and frustrations of adult life. Novelist Humphrey is honest: the seeds of tragedy having been sown early, the crop is tragic throughout. The Hunnicutt story ends in disaster and violence.

Home from the Hill is notable for its firm evocation of small-town attitudes. Like Faulkner, Humphrey knows that customs, especially Southern customs, are as important as life itself, and that to flout them can mean inviting death. Unlike Faulkner, he can unravel fabrics of suspicion, deceit, envy, love and hatred without getting the strands into a seemingly unmanageable snarl. His fine hunting scenes create a nostalgia for a vanishing side of U.S. life, and the crash of Theron Hunnicutt's ideals marks the passing of a Southern code of conduct. A book that a bit too plainly shows the sweat of honest labor, Home from the Hill is still a first novel that begins where most "promising" ones leave off.

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