Time in Reverse

FIRST LOVE AND LAST--Howard Coxe-- Harcourt, Brace ($2).

Time, measured by minutes or months, seconds or centuries, is as trickily undefinable as electricity. Author Howard Coxe's well-told tale attempts no definition but shows with ingenious clarity that one way of looking at time is backwards, over one shoulder. His story of a spinster's life begins with her death sentence, ends with the interview in her girlhood that lost her her lover. This reversal of the time sequence has a natural advantage of giving the story a marked crescendo. With his second book, Author Coxe has come a long stride forward since his first novel (Passage to the Sky). First Love and Last is a cleanly written, intelligent, first-rate job.

In 1931 old Miss Sara is a noted character, the Lady Bountiful of the New England town of Sparta. But the things she has lived for--the family name, her brother, her father, the man she used to love--have failed her. She will be sorry to die but not unready. In 1930 the last of her idols falls. From his cheap French widow Sara hears the truth about her beloved brother: he was a wastrel who died a drunkard's death. In 1929 she sees for the last time the fiance who jilted her but with whom she has always been in love. A onetime ambassador now, a rich man of the world, he breaks another idol when he tells her why and how he left her. In 1925 her father finally dies, a driveling idiot. But up to the very end Sara will not admit to anyone but herself that her father was not a great man, a worthy statesman, a good husband, a beloved father. Before that she has ample proof that all is not well in her family. Her sister Charlotte runs off with a ham actor. Rumors of her father's impending ruin drive Sara to a shocking interview with his mistress. Again & again the faithful Paul offers himself as a second-best husband, but Sara will not have him even after he is a widower. In spite of his unexplained departure and long silence, in spite of the series of anonymous letters telling what kind of man he is, she still believes in her beloved Lucius, whom she sends away angry after a lover's quarrel, one moonlit night in 1894.

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