Southern Adolescence

THE GOLDEN LIE (279 pp.)--Thomas Hal Phillips--Rinehart ($3).

Thomas Hal Phillips is a novelist, a Southerner, and 28. There stops all resemblance between Phillips and the decay-under-the-magnolias school of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Speed Lamkin. The South of Novelist Phillips, like the South of reality, is composed of ordinary people, good & bad, with the same feelings and frustrations as people anywhere else. His characters are no more decadent and perverse than folks in Idaho or Kansas, even though life does unroll with some regional twists.

The Golden Lie is the story of 16-year-old Foster Lloyd's growing up in Mississippi. Foster worships his tolerant, tippling, easygoing father. He is not sure how to feel about his mother: she is a religious militant who keeps badgering him to come to Sunrise Service when he would much rather hunt and talk with his dad. Foster watches the conflict between his parents work itself out, sees his father crumple in the prime of life, paralyzed by moonshine liquor that the zealous church-folk have spitefully poisoned.

Meanwhile, Foster is learning more about the way life separates people. He has grown up with Kirby, a Negro boy, for a friend; but the boys are reaching the age when the South no longer permits easy fraternizing. At first, Foster cannot understand why his mother objects when he brings Kirby in through the front door, nor can she explain. The friendship ends in a tragic death: Kirby is killed in a riot at a football game between white and Negro boys. This brings the big test of Foster's young life; despite his mother's hysterical protest he goes to the Negro church for the funeral.

The Golden Lie has faults; Its pace is too slow and its dialogue lacks individual flavor. But it is good as a study of family life, and as a portrait of the natural links between boys it is even better. Mississippi-born Novelist Phillips has already written a competent first novel (The Bitterweed Path); in the critical business of writing his second one he has taken a good step forward.

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