Troubles in the Delta

THE CROOKED WAY (247 pp.)--Elizabeth Spencer--Dodd, Mead ($3).

Amos Dudley grew up in the Mississippi hill country with two preoccupations, money and righteousness. He fooled himself into believing they were pretty much the same thing. Amos grabbed a slice of Delta wilderness, and, by relentlessly sweating his Negroes and himself, cleared the land, planted cotton and grew rich.

In his early years, Amos lived with a lusty, knockabout woman, but once he established his plantation he threw her over and married Ary Morgan, daughter of the local aristocracy. They built a house, had children--what else could Amos want? But it was almost as if he had been ordered to pay for the sins of his flinty heart. His marriage turned sour, his children disappointed him and his in-laws looked down on him as a presumptuous hillbilly. Only at the end, when he brought some of his own long-forgotten relations to live on his land, did Amos discover the difference between morality and ambition.

The Crooked Way is Mississippi-born Elizabeth Spencer's second novel, and it is almost a compendium of all the fashionable faults likely to be found in a young highbrow novelist. Her characters seem scooped from Faulkner rather than observed from life. Her technique of letting several characters tell the story in rotation, also reminiscent of Faulkner, is much too complex for her simple materials. And a throbby, portentous style suggests that, so far, she is more concerned with displaying her sensibility than releasing her story.

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