Alabama Town

THE PATCHWORK TIME (323 pp.)--Robert Gibbons--Knopf ($3).

This is the story of an Alabama town named Pineboro, a place of "tasseled pink-shaded livingroom lamps and bare kitchen bulbs."

Its major achievement is that Robert Gibbons makes his overdrawn characters credible. He has a sharp eye for the commonplaces of small-town life, a good ear for common speech, an unsparing fidelity in recording the stupidities and the brutalities of the townspeople. The imagination revealed in his characterizations, the lopsided half-caricatures that still talk a recognizable native language, indicate an emerging talent of the first importance. The defects in the book are consequently all the more glaring.

Its leading characters are Johnny Somers, history teacher; Crow Johnson, a hard-eyed, mean, man-about-Pineboro; Bill Boone, onetime football star; and Blackie Boone, his wife--"ask anybody in Fillmore about her." The portraits have the hard authenticity of those notices that are put up in post offices of people who are wanted for murder. And the characters seem like suspects in Author Gibbons' police lineup, blinking in the limelight, not quite sure of what they are charged with.

Mistrust. What they are charged with is (among other things) a lack of faith. They all have the same insincerity, the same distrust of anyone else's sincerity. They have the same raw ambition, the same bitter kiss-my-foot contempt for each other. They all have the same childish fretfulness of mind.

The trouble with the first 50 pages (and with the book) is Johnny Somers, the sole exception to the pattern. Johnny, the hero, is 21, shy, inexperienced, friendly, the sort of person to whom good-natured drunks confide their life histories, because he is too reticent to relate his own, too sympathetic to shut them up, and too polite to razz them. Like Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel! and like a thousand other intellectuals in American fiction, he thinks in a scrambled poetic prose--The memory of her face had the time of sunlight upon it.

Cunning. When Bill Boone and his wife enter the story they run off with it. Bill is short, stocky, cocky, with "a good-looking squarish face," now somewhat puffy, always getting in fights, which he always loses. He is an expert with dice, and has a pathetic eagerness for a respectable job that makes him vulnerable to his wife's malice. Bill is dragged out of a bar, sobered up, and hired as Pineboro's only salaried fireman. Some day he plans to be fire chief. The turn of the screw is that his brother-in-law (who has seduced Bill's good-looking wife) merely wanted to ruin Bill once & for all. With stupefying smalltown cunning, he calculated that some day Bill would be drunk when there was a fire.

His wife Blackie is as amoral as Bill, but far more intelligent, moving from Bill to his brother-in-law, from a happily married man to Johnny Somers, and from innocent Somers to a rural Machiavellian, Crow Johnson, managing violently dramatic exposures of her lovers, public humiliations, or rejoicing in such gothic scenes as an embrace beside a corpse.

Disillusion. The Patchwork Time is Robert Gibbons' second novel. (First was Bright Is the Morning.) Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1915, he began to write at 18, served during the war aboard an LST in the Pacific. His work is widely praised by such Southerners as Robert Penn Warren, Erskine Caldwell and Eudora Welty, seems typical of a growing school of graceless disillusionment in fiction, too accomplished not to be taken seriously, and too narrow not to be viewed with alarm by readers who respect its talents and potential contribution.

There is too much of everything in The Patchwork Time, too many recollections of childhood in the light of which maturity seems miserable, too many beers, too many fights, too many episodes all ending the same way, too many plots, too many betrayals, so that the reader's instinctive reaction is that it can't possibly be that bad, and that something fundamental has been left out.

It may be that what has been left out is more important and dramatic to smalltown life than what the novel contains--that the daily routines of the teaching of history or a job with the light company are more interesting than the talks in the barroom; that the religious faith of the community has an elevation more significant than is expressed in its condemnation of sexual misdoings; that the tormented love affairs reveal a groping tenderness deeper than the bitter words that attend their endings; and finally, that the whole texture of life, the routines of going to work and to school, marriage and the raising of families, is kindlier and happier than is ever stated in books like this.

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