Torments of a Good Man

MORTE D'URBAN (336 pp.)--J. F. Powers--Doubleday ($4.50).

If Father Urban plays a nearly professional game of golf, drinks only the best Scotch and smokes Dunhill Monte Cristo Colorado Maduro No. 1's, and if he is seen frequently in expensive restaurants with men whose grain is coarse although their shirts be fine, it must not be thought that he loves the world too well. His is not a case of "Hail Mammon, full of cash." Not at all. Father Urban knows and loves his duty, which is to God. But he knows also that he is by far the best fund raiser, and indeed almost the only capable man, in the Clementines, a small and not very notable Midwestern order. The tall, urbane priest is a city man whose name fits him nicely, and when he consumes champagne and shish kebab with a millionaire amid the turbaned blackamoors of Chicago's Pump Room, he is doing what all the other city men dining there are doing. He is working.

Not all of Father Urban's brothers and superiors understand this, however, and Urban, forced to defer to mediocrity, suffers the torments of a good man who is not allowed to do as well as he can. There is, indeed, one black period when Urban is taken off the lunch-and-lecture circuit and set to scraping wallpaper in a drafty retreat house.

Novelist Powers is anything but anticlerical, but in his sly, fond way he can twit the clerics sharply. He has a fine eye for the kind of Catholic foible that makes other Catholics wince. The founder of the Clementine order, for instance, was the (imaginary) martyr St. Clement, who was pressed to death between millstones. Naturally, given the Catholic fondness for sanguinary names, the order's publishing house is called the Millstone Press. The dear, droll priest has cluttered up magazines (Father Juniper) and movie houses (Bing and Barry) for years. The work of J. F. Powers, a New Yorker short-storyist writing his first novel, is of a higher order. During this superior burlesque, Powers deftly shades his portrait of Father Urban so that at the novel's end, when the priest grows old and ill, the reader feels not the absence of a comic figure but the loss of a man.

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