Pre-Ca!dwell

PURSLANE--Bernlce Kelly Harris--Universify of North Carolina Press ($2.50).

Novels like Purslane stand a good chance of being lost in the shuffle. First, it is published by a university press; second, its title makes it sound like a book on botany. But Purslane is worth a top place on any publisher's list. The first novel of a North Carolina folk-play writer, Purslane will remind most readers of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' South Moon Under. Unsentimental, authentic, humorous, moving, it tells a tale of a North Carolina hill family at the turn of the century.

The Fullers of Pate's Siding and their kin have far more in common with hard-working U. S. farmers of the West than with the bizarre, demoralized crackers of Erskine Caldwell's books. The Pate's Siding folk show about the usual run of rural superstitions: those who prepare for the end of the world during an eclipse are the same who invent the community's ghosts and picturesque fables. Their births, deaths, weddings, coon hunts, corn-huskings, box suppers, hog killings, squabbles, worries, jokes and tragedies are memorable because Author Harris writes about them sensitively and honestly rather than because they are dramatic in themselves.

Though the story has little plot, neither has it the parochialism of most regional novels. And even plot addicts will agree that it tells a good story.

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