Brooklyn Heights, 1906

THE SON OF ADAM WYNGATE (440 pp.)--Mary O'Hara--McKay ($3.75).

The Rev. Bartholomew Wyngate stood in the pulpit, outwardly poised, looking at the comfortable, wealthy members of his Brooklyn Heights congregation. They loved and admired him as a good preacher and model citizen. They had no more idea than Pastor Wyngate in that year, 1906, how many of the old Victorian certainties were crumbling. As he intoned his text, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," they settled back for a sermon that would be solid but undisturbing.

The Son of Adam Wyngate is the story of Pastor Wyngate's collapse, and a social novel of changing moral skies in turn-of-the-century America. For Mary O'Hara, author of such western idyls as My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead, it represents an ambitious departure; but she writes of a time and place she knows, since Novelist O'Hara grew up on Brooklyn Heights.

Actually, Pastor Wyngate was nervous as he began his sermon. In the rear of the church sat his older brother Ramsey, and Ramsey was everything that Bart was not: good-looking, self-confident and a bully at heart. Ramsey had turned the head of Bart's wife, Louise, before they were married. What would happen, Bart wondered, now that his brother had turned up again?

Anyone but Pastor Bart could have guessed. And Novelist O'Hara fills his bitter cup to overflowing. Bart came to learn that his wife had not only been unfaithful to him with brother Ramsey, but with a long list of casual characters as well. Bart Wyngate had a nervous breakdown.

The novel ends with a rejuvenated Bart, still strong in faith but humbled by his troubles and aware of human complexities and frailties he had never understood before. He goes back to Louise, ready to start life over again--though how her nymphomania is to be checked is never made quite clear.

Novelist O'Hara has seized on a solid theme, but has not written a novel fully worthy of it. The Son of Adam Wyngate is a meandering, overstuffed family saga, all too full of the human tedium which the skilled novelist suggests without reporting in grim detail. Clumsily written and badly in need of saving irony, The Son of Adam Wyngate reads more like an unedited transcript of family disaster than a dramatic portrait of it.

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