Books: Ohio Nights

THE NEPHEW (210 pp.)—James Purdy —Farrar, S+raus & Cudahy ($3.95).

This impressive new novel begins as a Midwestern idyl set on a leafy, residential street in Rainbow Center, Ohio. A widow er of 78. Realtor Boyd Mason comes home to the wide-lawned Victorian house he shares with his sister Alma, a spinsterish ex-schoolteacher. Each day is an agreeable carbon of the one before. Boyd grumbles contentedly about Alma’s bluntness, stinginess and love of gossip. Alma gets comfortably cross at Boyd’s deafness, his lack of interest in scandal, his irritating habit of forgetting to flush the toilet.

Occasionally they receive a letter from their soldier nephew, Cliff, whom they had raised since he was orphaned as a child. But Cliff is as emotionally tongue-tied as his aunt and uncle: his prosaic letters might as well be coming from nearby Cincinnati instead of distant, mysterious, embattled Korea. Then the comfortable, cozy pattern of the days is shattered by a War Department telegram reporting Cliff missing in action. Alma passionately insists Cliff is alive and will return; she decides to write an account of his life. “It would be a kind of family thing.” she tells her brother. “A kind of record just for us.”

Alma questions the neighbors about Cliff and at first gets the expected tame responses. But Faye Laird bursts unexpectedly into tears and her dotty old mother insults Alma. Wealthy, widowed Mrs. Barrington clearly knows more than she will say. Strangest of all are the talks with epicene Willard Baker and the peculiar young man who lives with him. As rumors build slowly into facts, Boyd impatiently tries to stop Alma from digging into events that “should have been for gotten long ago.” But Alma is a woman who must finish what she starts, and she rips frantically at the curtain of secrecy. “People have tried not to hurt me, to keep things from me all my life.” she cries. “But it always got to me at last and hurt me a thousand times more.”

As Alma finally discovers how little she had really known the boy who grew up in her house, another telegram confirms his death in battle. “I only loved him,” she mourns. “I never knew him.” But to love someone is enough. Mrs. Barrington tells her, “that’s all we dare hope for in this life.” The “record” of Cliff’s life, containing only a few tentative sentences, is wrapped in tissue paper and locked away in a drawer. Boyd and Alma, who have now become “permanently and very old, their correct age.” sit in the dark staring out at the quiet of a summer evening that holds the scent of azaleas and the sound of the courthouse clock striking the hour. In his previous books, Color of Darkness and Malcolm, Ohio-born James Purdy, 37, dealt with nightmare subjects in a complex, brooding style that often baffled readers. This time, in the manner of a futurist painter determined to show doubters he can be a master of realistic drawing if he chooses, Purdy uses a simple, controlled and explicit prose to achieve his eerie effects. Whether he is being opaque or clear, Novelist Purdy peoples his books with troubling and troubled human beings, proves himself a writer of considerable power and impressive originality.