The American's Castle

LIFE AT HAPPY KNOLL (167 pp.) -- John P. Marquand-- Little, Brown ($3.75).

In all the sociological fiction and fictional sociology on suburb and exurb, remarkably little has been written about the country club. The Charley Grays may occasionally get high there beyond the point of no return, or men in grey flannel suits may make unconvincing passes at fellow members' wives, but no one ever did a full-dress, inside-the-country-club story--until that Boswell of the American upper middle class, John P. Marquand, took on the task. Life at Happy Knoll (a series of sketches that first appeared in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED) is deftly ironic social comedy, as slight as the shorts of Happy Knoll's women members and as smooth as the club's putting greens.

The saga of Happy Knoll is told in a series of letters, most of them from Roger Horlick, harassed member of the board of governors, to Albert Magill, the club's president emeritus, well-heeled elder statesman and occasional philosopher--he has been known to compare Happy Knoll to the Baths of Caracalla. For all its outward bonhomie, the Horlick-Magill correspondence chronicles a perpetual crisis --settling foundations, unsettled bar bills, membership raids from the wily rival club, Hard Hollow, and fights between locker room cliques (the change-shoes-and-leave set v. the shower-and-have-a-few-drinks faction). With no trouble at all the sociology-minded will be able to find in Happy Knoll a microcosm of American society. The women are aggrievedly aggressive; the young are unruly and pampered; the dining-room help is incompetent; advertising men (speechwise, they are horrifying) are closing in; the club deficit mounts; free enterprise must sometimes be disguised with a sort of private welfare statism, as when the critical caddie shortage is solved by establishing the Caddies' Revolving Incentive Fund. And the rapacious golf pro, who year after year keeps promising his customers that their game will improve, is in a sense the guardian of the American dream. At Happy Knoll, a bit of snobbism is not only the opium of the Mrs. but the Miltown of both sexes ("How many Cadillacs are there at Hard Hollow? Two. How many at Happy Knoll? Eight on a summer's weekday and often twenty of a Saturday!").

Author Marquand's mellow, witty writing sticks as close to the characters' speech as a tonsil, as close to their skins as a T shirt. He really loves them all, with good reason. Their camaraderie is real and appealing, as is their occasional touch of middle-aged resignation (sometimes known as wisdom). Marquand suggests that the country club is an oasis of sanity shut away "from a few of the more unpleasant realities that surround us." With its parking spaces achoke, its locker rooms asweat, its bars awash, and a loyal barkeep resolutely giving the little woman at the end of the telephone the wrong answer as to her husband's whereabouts, the U.S. country club may just possibly be the American's castle--and in its way no less impressive than the Baths of Caracalla.

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