The Weak & the Strong

MAN AND BOY (212 pp.)--Wright Morris--Knopf ($3).

"Mr. Ormsby turned slowly on the bed, careful to keep the coil springs quiet, and as he lowered his feet he reached for his socks on the floor. They were gone. Well, he should have known that. They were gone Sunday mornings and all National holidays. This was not a National holiday, but it was a great day for Mother, and time for him, anyhow, to change his socks."

It was a great day for Mother, all right, but it was time, high time, for Mr. Ormsby to change more than his socks. Not that he ever would change; his marriage fitted him like a diaper. It suited Mother too; she didn't mind tending him like an infant, so long as she could jab him with the pin whenever she pleased. Of course, it had been pretty hard on their only son, growing up between a father he despised and a mother he feared--so hard that he had run away and enlisted in the Marines. Now he was dead, a hero, and today was the day when Mother would christen the destroyer escort with his sorrowful name.

Man and Boy is the brief chronicle of that christening day. The plot is perfunctory: Mr. & Mrs. Ormsby get up, dress, catch a train for New York, and are escorted to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Mr. Ormsby takes a back seat while Mother makes an embarrassing little speech. What matters is that the streams of Mr. & Mrs. Ormsby's consciousness flow through the day as through a net, in which Novelist Wright Morris gently seines out their memories and their feelings: here & there a kicking silver act of courage, but mostly just the debris of an average bad marriage.

In fact, Novelist Morris fishes so quietly, and in such common waters, that the uncommon quality of his haul may easily be overlooked. He has an insight which tells him that simple minds are only as simple as they are thought to be. Father is not just a stupid, henpecked husband, but a stifled human nature battling forlornly in middle age with the first problem of childhood: to establish an identity. Mother is not merely a domineering woman, but a terrifying archetype of the man-hater, a domestic tyrant whose methods could teach something to Machiavelli, perhaps even to Freud.

Nebraska-born Wright Morris, 41, now lives in Pennsylvania, divides his time between writing and photography (he has written five previous books, illustrated two of them). Man and Boy has some important faults: it is sometimes slickly sentimental, and the coarse humor does not always make the reader smile, as it is intended to. It nonetheless belongs among the best novels this spring.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.