Books: Kansas Gothic

FOR THE TIME BEING (219 pp.)—Julia Siebel—Harcourt, Brace & World ($3.95).

Kansas-born Novelist Julia Siebel seems intent on becoming the laureate of quiet lives desperately lived. In two novels about her native state, there is an occasional wheat-crop failure, but the yield of domestic unhappiness is as invariable as debt and taxes. In The Narrow Covering (TIME, July 30, 1956), careless and malevolent death bore down on ordinary prairie folk to whom Author Siebel assigned hardly a pleasant, let alone a happy, moment. For the Time Being is relatively upbeat. No one dies. Yet no one lives, either; like a quarter section of Spoon River Anthology, the human crop is sown with indifference and raised in contumely. It is only because Author Julia Siebel speaks with an oldfashioned, simple authority now almost absent from U.S. fiction that her lugubrious chronicles about doomed small folk deserve to be read.

Paul Bembroy is by definition a non-hero. Having failed both as a lawyer and then as a farmer, he now runs a grain elevator for a prosperous friend in a lonely wheat town. He is competent and intelligent and resigned. His big, blonde wife has given him three children whom he can hardly approach, so deep is the gulf of misunderstanding. And the wife herself has been blinded by an accident. Yet it is she who, by comparison, takes on the heroic cast. She goes on doing the housework, baking the bread, coping with the children. As for Paul, he has found an escape hatch in amateur astronomy. Weather permitting, he is out on the prairie each night with his telescope, tailing comets and sifting nebulae, sending the reports of his small findings to a society of amateur astronomers in the East.

Knowing the cast of Author Siebel’s mind, the only real question is: How tough will things get for the Bembroys? But what is apparent throughout For the

Time Being is that the writer of the script knows her people and their backyards, as well as they know the patches on their clothes. And when Paul Bembroy discovers a new, or rediscovers an old, comet, his joyless and loveless life seems to have been justified.