Mixed Fiction

THE HUGE SEASON, by Wright Morris (306 pp.; Macmillan; $4.25), takes a set of characters that might have been found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's wastebasket and imagines what became of them in the harsh morning after the tender night. Among the characters: a young, rich Greek god from the Middle West who is soul-sick for no clearly apparent reason; a flapper who literally sinks her teeth into nice young men; a nice young man; a Jewish intellectual who can't make up his mind whether he wants to be a quarter-miler or just a social climber. Comes the dawn, and the "lone eagles" turn into "a covey of sitting ducks." One of them also turns into a dead pigeon. The others boozing, cynical or hitting the Prufrock-bottom of resignation--live by remembering. Almost everybody sooner or later tries to shoot himself or else to write a book. Promising Author Morris (The Works of Love, The Deep Sleep) writes with an almost British smoothness--ex cept when he lapses into a stream-of-consciousness cablese that makes him sound like a Western Union clerk on the analyst's couch. Morris offers many rewarding moments of major excitement and minor truth. But he deliberately invites comparison with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and beside these great American romantic realists, Morris looks perhaps adult but certainly dull. Where Fitzgerald could turn rotgut into champagne, Morris turns champagne into Alka-Seltzer.

THE LAST HUNT, by Milton Loft (399 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $3.95) is the story of the age of slaughter when, in the space of 20 years, the hide hunters wiped the buffalo herds from the face of the West. From Texas to Idaho they left "nothin but bones layin white in the sun like an alkali flat . . . and the wagon wheels breakin em like sticks." Milton Lott. 35-year-old millwright who got a Houghton Mifflin fellowship for this first novel, was born and raised in the Snake River country, the scene of his story. He describes his hunters' comfortless lives with an intimacy of detail that makes fine reading even of such simple events as pitching camp or building a fire. Author Lott spares the reader nothing--every gush of blood from a stricken buffalo's mouth, the way a carcass explodes in the sun "with a great pop and sigh," the mechanical difficulties of skinning an Indian. This is no mere western yarn, and there are no heroics about Lett's hunters: Charley kills because he finds his manhood in killing, Sandy with an uneasy distaste for the waste. Though the dialogue is occasionally as awkward as a bull calf, Lett's uncluttered sense of scene and even-paced storytelling give the book strength and fascination.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.