Lower Suburbia

IT'S ONLY TEMPORARY (273 pp.) --Charles Mergendahl--Doubleday ($3).

Camptown had 4,276 homes and they were all the same. Each living room had a picture window and a real wood-burning fireplace. Upstairs was an expansion attic ("You have the joy of finishing the second floor yourself"). The master bedroom was a barnlike 10 ft. by 11 1/2. Each front door was flanked by the advertised "shrubbery"--two arborvitae bushes. All the floors were linoleum-covered, all the walls were plywood, and all the lumber was green.

Camptown split into two groups, the conservatives who set their alarms for 6:50 and had a good breakfast before they set out to catch the 8:04 commuter train, and the mad-dashers who lolled till after 7. But by the time they reached the station, dressed in the standard uniform of gabardine topcoat and mouse-grey hat, they were pretty indistinguishable. For these were young men planning to get ahead in the world, ex-G.I.s to a man, whose stay at Camptown, they assured one another, was "only temporary."

The fun that Author Charles Mergendahl has with such background stuff is the best thing in his light little novel, It's Only Temporary. Whenever he sticks to impressionistic sketches of packaged postwar living, his book is amusing. But since It's Only Temporary is also supposed to be a novel, Mergendahl feels obligated to write about people. The result is a soupy and inept story about Veteran Don Cousins and his wife Shelley, who cannot decide whether to save money by sticking to Camptown and his job or take the long chance of striking out for Montana and starting a business of their own. It turns out to be a case of dull people getting in the way of an interesting setting. Though he hasn't made very much of his subject, Author Mergendahl deserves a mild cheer for having tried, at least, to write about his Dons and Shelleys, people who are at least as representative of current U.S. life as anybody else, and currently least represented in U.S. fiction. The Beacon Hill set has Marquand, the Chicago slums have Farrell, the Mississippi farmers have Faulkner and the Okies have, or used to have, Steinbeck. In faithful seriousness or satiric affection, lower-income suburbia deserves a look.

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