Ministers' Children

HEAVY LADEN--Philip Wylie--Knopf ($2.50). The Rev. Hugh McGreggor, lion of the Lord, cleaned up a saloon-ridden Ohio town, survived two flesh-and-blood wives and one great War, and reaped as reward a luxurious country-club parish in the "Gilt-edged suburb of America." His pulpit thunderings were consistently concerned with Faith, and helped considerably to deaden his own still small voice of doubt. But Ann, his modernist daughter, suspected him of puritanical hypocrisy, and flung herself the more violently into a materialistic existence that was promiscuous, not to say debauched. McGreggor, sensual himself, imagined her life as accurately as it is possible for a Victorian to imagine looseness; but did not take it to heart until Ann expounded to him the explicit creed of her unmorality. Terrified by realization of his religious failure as exemplified in Ann, Hugh resigned his worldly parish and became pastor of "the barest and humblest of churches." Ann settled down, in time, to suburban matronliness; rearing her children as conventionally as her stuccoed neighbors reared theirs. And the conflict between two generations came to an end.

For all his insistence upon his own boredom with the matter in hand and indifference to the curiosity of his reader, Author Wylie tells his age-old story with gusto, relish, and a naive zest in his discovery of the differences between two successive generations. Wise enough, perhaps, to know that there is no answer, he offers none.