Do-Gooder Undone

THE POORHOUSE FAIR (185 pp.)--John Updike--Knopf ($3.50).

Novelist John Updike's literary voice is low and gentle; he chooses a quiet theme and carefully understates it to the threshold of inaudibility. In his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, he picks the bones of some old people's lives in whispers. Yet Poorhouse is less concerned with old age than with the clash between the bloodless ideal of social perfectibility and the pungent humanity of the old Adam. On this subject Author Updike's whispers are sibilant with meaning.

The trouble at New Jersey's Diamond County Home for the Aged begins on the day of the annual August fair. The oldsters awake to find little tin name plates tacked to their wicker porch chairs. Gregg, a 70-year-old rebel without a cause, splenetically pries his tag loose. The philosophic Hook, an old man's old man of 94, observes mildly of Gregg's feat that workmanship is not what it once was. The armchair rebellion merely saddens Conner, the poorhouse prefect. A self-punishing do-gooder, Conner needs the inmates' gratitude to mirror his righteousness. As the day wears on, instances of man's, and even nature's ingratitude multiply. Gregg lures a diseased cat into the poorhouse grounds, and Prefect Conner orders it shot, increasing the murmurings against him. A truck loaded with Pepsi-Cola rams through a section of the compound's wall. Rain drives the inmates into the sitting room, where they cackle like a Greek chorus while Hook and Conner debate the merits of God v. scientific rationalism.

No one guesses that the poorhouse fair will erupt in an ugly show of violence toward Conner. Symbolically, it is the mock crucifixion of a false Christ. Hungering for the bread of understanding, the old people had been fed the cold tin plates of social progress. Updike unfolds his parable with stylistic elegance. But, too polite to talk about the sin of pride, he gradually throws away his book's sense of purpose.

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