Down South in Maine

A LAMP FOR NIGHTFALL (211 pp)--Erskine Caldwell--Duell, Sloan & Pearce--Little, Brown ($3).

One thing about Novelist Erskine Caldwell: he plays no regional favorites. He sniffs out fictional meanness and degeneracy with the zest of a Berkshire in a barnyard, and he imagines them as readily in staid old New England as he does in the meaner stretches of Georgia. Actually the region doesn't matter. By now, Caldwell's characters are not so much recognizable people as mass-produced toys which squeak set speeches and make appropriate gestures when wound up. In Episode in Palmetto (1950) he blessedly called a halt to the "cyclorama of Southern life" that got its start with Tobacco Road. But the halt was only temporary.

Now, in A Lamp for Nightfall, he un-limbers the old routine in a Maine setting. This time it is the old Yankee stock that is going to pot, steadily losing ground to the more vital "Canucks" and "square-heads." Take the Emerson family, Author Caldwell's prime exhibit: Thede Emerson. richest man in Clearwater, has $200,000 in the bauk, but will he let his son Howard go off to college in Boston? No, he keeps him at home doing chores so he won't have to get a hired man. Thede hates the French Canadians, but he is letting his daughter Jean marry one because he figures no "petered-out American" has the gumption to support her. He knows that his wife Rosa is regularly making love to a younger man out in the woods, but he puts up with it as long as she does the housework.

And that isn't all. Brother Howard has a hankering for his sister Jean, and feels desperate because she is getting married. As for Jean, she feels so strongly drawn to brother Howard that it is all she can do to keep away from him. With Jean married at last and with nothing to look forward to but chores, Howard does the natural thing: he commits suicide with his father's shotgun. When old Thede finds him, he lets Howard have another shell in the chest for good luck. Wife Rosa walks out on Thede, and when last seen, he is holed up alone in his kitchen in dead of winter, lighting a lamp for the window to show the world that the Clearwater Emersons are still kicking.

This tasteless yarn may well be the beginning of a new "cyclorama," though Author Caldwell admits that he sometimes stares at his typewriter for three days without being able to write a word. The words he has already written have made him one of the world's bestselling authors in reprint (more than 28 million copies) and one of Soviet Russia's favorite U.S. writers.

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