Rewards & Punishments

PARRIS MITCHELL OF KINGS Row (333 pp.)--Henry and Katharine Bellamann--Simon & Schuster ($3).

Kings Row, a bestseller of eight years ago, was an oversized and overwritten but doggedly sympathetic effort to see through the front doors and store clothes of a whole Midwestern horse-&-buggy town. When Author Henry Bellamann died in 1945, he was working on the second book of what he had planned as a trilogy. Finished by his wife Katherine, Parris Mitchell of Kings Row (the Literary Guild selection for May) carries the story through World War I, continues with unimaginative tolerance a chronicle of everyday good & evil that readers of the first book will welcome as they would a return to interrupted gossip.

Young Doctor Parris Mitchell (the hero of Kings Row), a home-town boy but a Vienna-trained psychiatrist, has become a paragon of goodness. As a disciple of Freud, he naturally has a hard time convincing his fellow citizens that he is more than a doubletalking quack. In time he not only shames his narrow-minded enemies but gives them, free, some sobering doses of analysis as well. At times coming very close to being a boring do-gooder, he rids a local rich man of his compulsion to bay like a hound, comforts the intimidated German townspeople when World War I comes along, and nearly kills himself treating the town's poor.

But poor Dr. Mitchell, successful psychiatrist that he is, is stumped by his own marital troubles. Neither he nor his wife fill the bill for each other, something everyone but the doctor seems to realize. When he finally becomes aware that he covets another woman, the wife conveniently dies and in the glow of his new love the hero recovers his emotional and spiritual balance.

Through Dr. Mitchell, the Authors Bellamann attempt what amounts to a mass psychoanalysis of the town of Kings Row. Rape, murder and lesser sins are examined in language that seems lifted from a handbook of psychiatric cliches. And thanks to a brazenly contrived plot, good is rewarded and evil gets its come-uppance with a sureness and thoroughness that real life rarely witnesses.

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