Breathing City

MARIA LIGHT (181 pp.)--Lester Goran --Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).

Ben Light was a big Irishman who lived in a mining town outside Pittsburgh and sold moonshine during the Depression for 20 a full shot no color and 25-c- colored yellow. The law never got him. but he turned from a laughing, joyful man into a bitter man when a malignant tumor grew in his knee. That was not what actually killed him. He was hit by lightning and three men carried him home dead. The bank foreclosed on his widow a few months later, and she had to move to a Government housing project in Pittsburgh.

Lester Goran writes about the widow Light, gossiping as if he were sitting on a sidewalk bench, killing time on a summer night. As in his fine first novel. The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue, Goran recreates slumside Pittsburgh with superbly detailed tessellations of anecdote. An itchy slut of a woman up on the third floor sings Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree with her soldier friends and kicks them all out just before her husband gets back from his war-worker job at midnight. Mrs. Bagley from the other side of the garbage court passes the word that Hitler was "a fairy--honest. I hear he's a morphydike." Everyone speculates about the war.

"Churchill has got plenty of property investments in France, particularly along the coasts--it's a sure thing you're not going to see any armies landing there." In the end, the reader knows a lot about Maria Light. She works in a bakery shop, then in a pawnshop on Mechanic Avenue run by a 70-year-old sex fiend who tries to buy her body for $10 and failing, proposes marriage. She faithfully supports her invalid father-in-law. She longs for a man in bed with her but rejects one after another because they are all beneath her standard.

But for all that, Maria Light remains a faceless and not fully realized heroine in an otherwise excellent novel. She does not breathe the way the city breathes. Already a good novelist, Lester Goran will become an important one when he can draw his major figure as well as he sketches the small ones: "Archie came in the door with his habitual stoop although the door opening was well above his head." he writes of one quickly come-and-gone man in this book. "He had that shy manner that always indicated that what he was going to say was not worth hearing, and where he walked there would soon be a broken vase left in pieces behind him." Pieces like that are worth putting together.

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