Outsiders Don't Know

PEYTON PLACE (372 pp.)--Grace Metalious--Julian Messner ($3.95).

A month before this book's publication, Boston papers broke into a rash of headlines: SPICY BOOK HAS NEW HAMPSHIRE TOWN AGOG. The town: Gilmanton (pop. 750). The book's author: Novelist Grace Metalious, 32, plump, ponytailed, blue-jeaned wife of the principal of Gilmanton's grammar school. The school board had not renewed George Metalious' contract, but the decision was taken, said the board convincingly, before anyone knew what was in the book. Still, Grace remarked grandly to reporters: "I knew this would happen. Everybody who lives in a small town knows what's going on--but they don't want outsiders to know."

No wonder. Every character in Peyton Place, from the gallused bench-sitters on Elm Street to the assured local mill owner, has a lurid history that John O'Hara's characters might envy. Novelist Metalious suggests that sex is never long out of the town's mind; anyway, it seldom is out of hers. Her hero (strangely enough a schoolteacher with a Greek name) courts the local widow with such niceties as "a stunning blow across the mouth with the back of his hand." And her love scenes are as explicit as love scenes can get without the use of diagrams and tape recorder. By sheer volume, the low animal moans produced "deep in the throat'' by Peyton Place's mating females must be audible clear to White River Junction.

But when Authoress Metalious is not all flustered by sex, she captures a real sense of the tempo, texture and tensions in the social anatomy of a small town. Her ear for local speech is unflinching down to the last four-letter word, and her characters have a sort of rawboned vitality that may produce low animal moans in many a critic's throat.

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