People Who Live in the Shade

OLD POWDER MAN by Joan Williams. 312 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95.

Tennessean Joan Williams grew up in one of those recesses of the Old South where life resists change. Her first novel, The Morning and the Evening, was laid on just such fertile literary ground, and it established her as one of the most promising among the new group of Southern novelists (TIME, May 19, 1961). Old Powder Man, her second, keeps the promise.

Her story is simple to the point of artlessness. It is scarcely a story at all. The book follows the course of Frank Wynn, the Powder Man of the title, from piney-woods Arkansas to success as a dynamite salesman--a calling not at all improbable in a country where blasting reclaims swampland, opens farm ditches and helps tame the Mississippi in time of flood. Frank dies, having made the discovery that "it had been more fun making his money than having it."

This seems like meager stuff to spin out to book length, and indeed readers who like excitement, suspense, significance, and action will be disappointed. Author Williams' gifts lie in other directions. Her words flow with the great simplicity of someone unaware of an audience, or indifferent to its presence. Her mind remembers those shaded places where life beats at a cooler pulse, and she summons with utter fidelity the simple people who live in the shade. Powder Man is a small triumph, and a kind of spell.

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