Southern Discomfort

THE LOVED AND THE UNLOVED (248 pp.) --Thomas Hal Phillips--Harper ($3).

The practitioners of the sorghum and shotgun school of fiction usually start with two advantages: their general grimness, a quality of mind sympathetic to critics; the fact that they follow red clay paths already cleared for the public by William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. These advantages may make Southerner Phillips' fourth novel a success.

The hero is a sharecropper's son named Max Harper, a simple, violent, yet good-hearted fellow with a clubfoot. He falls in love with the landlord's daughter and develops an understandable hatred for her mean, spoiled brother. The paternalistic but unscrupulous landlord persuades young Harper to sign lying papers in order to get his clubfoot straightened at an insurance company's expense. Healed, Harper becomes a combat infantryman in World War II. He returns to find his cabin burned down, his girl married, and the landlord's wicked son in charge of the farm. When the son threatens to expose Harper's insurance fraud. Harper shoots him dead.

This unhappy tale is told in the first person, a technique that fails because the author predicates a low intellectual ceiling yet a high level of sensibility for Max Harper, and systematically violates both. He contradicts the hero's simplicity by putting such high-flown ideas in his head as this: "A man's mind is the scales and his heart is the balance, and the weight of a matter depends on the heaviness of the heart."

Author Phillips has produced a keg of potent Southern discomfort recommended only to those who agree that "the weight of a matter depends on the heaviness of the heart."

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