Fair State

STATE FAIR -- Phil Stong -- Century ($2.50).

Everything always happens for the worst, the philosophic storekeeper back home used to wiseacre, but the Frake family are off to Des Moines and the Iowa State Fair, and nothing better could happen than that. Abel Frake guides the rumbling truck along the moonlit country roads. Beside him, his wife Melissa straddles the box of pickles she will exhibit. Their children, Margy and Wayne, are not in such a happy state of mind. Before they left, Margy had quarreled with her boy Harry because he kissed her, Wayne with his girl Eleanor because she would not kiss him. But the only really unhappy one is Blue Boy, the Hampshire boar, who grunts in his crate at every bump. Blue Boy is going to the Fair, is going to win the Sweepstake prize. This truck ride bothers him, just the same, for as the hired man said, "No hawg is ever pleased."

At the Fair everything goes better than fairly well. Melissa sweeps the pickle show, Blue Boy sweeps the hogs. But Margy and Wayne are the real winners. On a roller-coaster Margy meets Pat, a journalist. Besides general information she learns a lot about love from him. Wayne receives a similar initiation from Emily, whose father, a horsy gentleman, follows the Fairs. Gently, and with no damage done, Emily seduces Wayne, but refuses to marry him when he proposes. She has merely given him, as Pat has given Margy, a free and freeing lesson in the art of love.

Back to the farm go the happy Frakes. Melissa will settle down to good home life again. Abel will see that Blue Boy propagates more perfect pigs. Margy and Wayne will return to Harry and Eleanor, able now to love without being abashed by love's physiology.

The Author. Twelve novels Author Stong threw into the incinerator, or, as his wife says, laid away in lavender. State Fair, the 13th, is his first to be published, is the Literary Guild selection for May. Belonging to the fourth generation of lowans on both sides of the family, Author Stong was noted for hay-pitching and hog-calling in his youth, became a journalist later on. He foundered with the New York World when it went down, landed in an advertising agency (Young & Rubicam). The unusual native charm of his State Fair is achieved less by literary magic than by his hometown knowledge of the farmer-philosopher civilization indigenous to Iowa. Says he: "I was an lowan for 17 years. Once in a while they commit suicide or there's a baby the village hadn't expected. But take the run of them and they're pretty good, salty folks." Of novel-writing: "Last summer I went at it scientifically. I got in good physical condition. I'd take a cold bath, wear only shorts, have a cold drink handy. I'd wallop the typewriter hot."

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