Ase's Agonies

THE SOJOURNER (327 pp.)--Mor/or/e Kinnan Rowlings--Scrlbner ($3.50).

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings might well have called her latest novel "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Her farmer hero, Ase Linden, is a rawboned, ungainly man of probity without a mean bone in his 6 ft. 4 in. body. Born in a log cabin in the 18605, Ase dies in the age of flight, but his sad saga never gets off the ground.

Ase's big trouble is a plague of human locusts. His mother squeezes out the juices of her love for his dashing, rakehell brother Ben, leaves young Ase only the rind of contempt. When Ben quits the family farm to go fortune-hunting, Ase is left not only with all the chores but also with Nellie, one of Ben's girls. Nellie tries to be a good wife to him, but though she heats his bed she rarely warms his heart. They have five children, but only one, his frail daughter Dolly, ever tugs very hard at Ase's heartstrings. One winter day Ase's mother, half-crazed by Ben's continued absence, takes Dolly walking in a blizzard and loses her. Ase buries his child in a tiny, hand-hewn coffin.

Through the years, Ase sows his fields with wheat and reaps stones in his bread. His mother goes completely mad. His two best friends, a pixy of an Irishman and an ugh-ly Indian, die while helping him. His eldest son butters political palms for crooked contracts, and his youngest is killed at Chateau-Thierry. Even the crops fail, and he has to peddle firewood from door to door. One last chord of longing keeps Ase playing at life: he wants to see his brother Ben before he dies. At the age of 80, he does. He finds Ben a wizened-up derelict dying in a Frisco flophouse. "I failed," Ase tells him. "You've done right, Ase," says Ben. Both brothers die content.

Replete with hangnail character sketches and hangdog attitudes, Author Rawlings' revised Book of Job is a sententious smudge compared to her famed, finely drawn 1938 novel, The Yearling. "Writing is agony," Author Rawlings once confessed, but there was a time when her books didn't show it.

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