Woodchuck Roundup

THE MARMOT DRIVE (273 pp.)--John Mersey--Knopf ($3.50).

There are still people who think that everything important about a man can be learned while watching him through a few hands of poker. And there have always been novelists who believed that a set of characters would give themselves away dramatically if forced into close, catalytic quarters. Favorite places to bring out the best and worst in people have been ships, planes, hotels, tropic outposts, small combat units, African safaris. It remained for Novelist John (A Bell for Adano, The Wall) Hersey to put his characters to the test in a modern-day woodchuck roundup. None of the people in The Marmot Drive like each other very much to begin with. When Hester comes up from New York for a weekend at the out-of-the-way small town of Tunxis, Conn., it is to meet the family of Eben, a moody young fellow she has taken up with in the big city. What Hester and Eben have not been told is that Selectman Matthew Avered, Eben's father, has organized a two-day drive to rid the neighborhood of a plague of wood-chucks. Nothing will do but that they take their place in the beaters' line. Hester is no mental ball of fire, but a few things quickly become clear to her: 1) most of the people in the town resent

Selectman Matthew, though they take his orders, 2) dynamic Matthew Avered is twice the man his sensitive son is, 3) she wants the older man, not the younger man, to make love to her.

Hester is afraid of woodchucks, but the drive is hardly under way when she lets a third party kiss the blackberry stain off her lips and finds she likes it. But it is when Hester goes into an abandoned church with Matthew Avered and tries to seduce him that the real trouble starts.

Matthew ignores her advances, but in their absence the marmot drive has begun to go badly. At roundup's end, only 37 animals have been corralled instead of the hundreds the selectman promised. Besides, someone has spied him and Hester together, and he is accused of attempted rape.

Hester never speaks up to defend him. In an impromptu "court," Matthew is judged guilty, then taken to the village green, tied to an old whipping post and lashed.

Since all the characters, including Hester, are extremely reticent about explaining themselves, there rises around The Marmot Drive an atmosphere of smoky symbolism. Though the book is smoothly written, its characters never quite develop enough force to blow the smoke away.

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