You Can't Go Home Again

A PRIDE OF LIONS (308 pp.)--John Brooks--Harper ($3.50).

At 30, with a good job in a Manhattan publisher's office and the love of a fine girl, Tom Osborne learned a truth that has plagued many a small-towner: a young fellow may walk out on home, family and background, but that does not necessarily get them out of his system.

Tom returns to his home town for a week or so to help the old folks get the house repaired. Novelist Brooks uses this slender and unpromising pretext to merge past and present in a way that would make that old master of the flashback, John Marquand, nod with approval. Tom's ancestors had helped to found the town of East Bank, had fought against the British to hold it. Now, shorn of both money and influence, the family has one great fear: change. They don't like to see people with foreign names getting rich and powerful. They are clannish to the point of absurdity, persist in thinking that they are the upper crust of East Bank long after most East Bankers have begun to laugh behind their stiff, straight backs.

Still, it is the old folks in A Pride of Lions who engage the reader's sympathy. It is one of the merits of Novelist Brooks that he can disengage the social absurdities and crotchetiness of the passing generation from the admirable character that lies underneath. In fact, young Tom Osborne, nice, sensible fellow that he is, looks and sounds downright uninteresting when he is set beside his retired-lawyer father and his crusty contemporaries back home.

By the time Tom's memories have been fully exposed, everything from his childhood recollection of horses' hooves on cobbled streets to his father's class reunion at Princeton has been examined for possible significance. When Tom returns to New York for good, he no longer disdains his roots--but he is no longer enmeshed by them, either.

The story is handled with fine ease, and the characters talk with a naturalness that is not at all common in current fiction. What A Pride of Lions sadly lacks is suspense, exactly what Marquand uses to give urgency to situations no more exciting than the one Brooks starts with. Whether or not the elder Osborne succeeds in keeping a big oil company from industrializing sleepy old East Bank never gets to be of any real interest. And Tom's love affair with a girl who at first doesn't understand East Bankers is pallid to the point of boredom.

The clash of generations is always a surefire theme in the hands of the right novelist. Brooks has handled it well, written cleanly and knowingly. If to his thoughtfulness and intelligence he can add artfulness and energy, he can reasonably aspire to fill the shoes of Marquand himself some day.

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