Mandarin Apprentice

A LONG DAY'S DYING (267 pp.)--Frederick Buechner--Knopf ($3).

Frederick Buechner is a 23-year-old Princeton graduate ('47) about whom there will soon be lots of excited chatter in Manhattan avant-garde circles. His first novel, published this week, is a remarkably gifted and almost convincing display of virtuosity. At the opposite pole from such toughie novelists as Norman Mailer and Nelson Algren, Buechner employs the mannered, slightly effete and shimmeringly elegiac style of Henry James, which English Critic Cyril Connolly has aptly labeled Mandarin. Probably, Buechner is a forerunner of a spate of bright young Mandarins due to be turned out as highbrow critics enlarge their present beachheads in the English departments of U.S. universities. (One of the best of such critics, R. P. Blackmur, was Buechner's teacher at Princeton.)

The story of A Long Day's Dying is as threadbare as its style is elaborate. A middle-aged and middle-class woman, Elizabeth Poor, visits her son Leander at an eastern university, obviously Princeton ("this sweet and dangerous hospital that nobody wants to leave"). There, her senses quickened by the gaiety of a college weekend, she has a brief affair with one of her son's friends, a young English instructor. Leander, radiantly innocent in the weekend's preoccupations, is unaware of his mother's misstep.

Then comes the long and painful morning after. Back in New York, one of Elizabeth's friends, a man whose awesome obesity drives him to play the cultured jester, pries into the weekend with neurotic zeal. He corners -Elizabeth into the falsehood that she had nothing to do with the English instructor and that, in fact, she suspects him of an improper relationship with her son. Both the friend and the instructor discover she has lied, and in a murky finale all the characters are brought together to stare at the web of guilt and deception they have erected.

Some of Author Buechner's pages are gems of allusive writing, but they are so self-consciously and calculatedly polished that they break the continuity of the novel, and in a few places read like a parody of Chief Mandarin Henry James himself. Buechner has yet to learn how to whip a novel to an unimpeded climax and how to create characters not so transparently stereotyped as Leander, the young university god, and the so-elegant, so-intelligent instructor. But the talent is unmistakably there.

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