Grapes Without Wrath

THE FRUIT TRAMP (247 pp.)--Vinnie Williams--Harper ($3.50).

Raffish characters and an offbeat setting can sometimes save a novel. This is what happens in The Fruit Tramp, a warm-hearted little first book about itinerant fruit and vegetable pickers who traipse along with the harvests. The orphaned hero, Polk Watson, leaves a Georgia farm to hit the picker's trail with his Uncle Chunk, a shrewd, garrulous, gallused cracker who proves to the hilt Author Williams' observation that "no picking machine invented can cup and coax a tomato free like the human hand." Polk grows up in a seedy world of depressing boarding houses, trailer camps and sudden violence which gives the flashes of human love and devotion an original and affecting backdrop. By the time the Widow Odom tells him in Florida, "Boy, you're getting handsomer than the Devil in snakeskin shoes," Polk is reasonably immune to the surprises of life.

But no amount of immunity can save him from falling for Fawny May, a cotton farmer's daughter. Trouble is that Fawny is a born homemaker. Looking at the rich soil around the deserted house she wants them to buy, she exclaims: "Plant you a teacup handle here, next dinnertime you'd cut a set of china." Uncle Chunk has long since warned Polk: "A rolling stone don't gather no mortgages." So off they roll, to the Southwest, to California, wherever a crop is making. Author Williams' world is an inevitable reminder of John Steinbeck's dustbowl refugees in The Grapes of Wrath, but she has incurred no literary debt. Hers is a book of little form, but the substance is fresh, and all the accidents, coincidences and rashes of sentimentality are not allowed to get too far beyond life's normal quota.

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