Moss on the Manse

THE DAUGHTERS OF NECESSITY (317 pp.) -- Peter S. Feibleman -- World ($4.50).

An experienced Wagnerian soprano can strike an attitude and hold it motionless for what can seem like a half-hour; but the characters in this umbrous opera of moss on the manse may stay frozen for 20 years or more in the postures of their neuroses. "She did not change again," writes Author Feibleman of the hero's sweetly frigid second wife, "by so much as the amount of cream in her morning coffee." He could have added that the hero himself does not alter by a jot, after a point early in the novel, and neither do his two tormented daughters. Observed briefly, each member of this wealthy Southern family seems whole and healthy; followed for a period of years, each one is seen to be stunned by some calamity beyond all chance of growth or shrinkage.

The core of the book is a well-conceived act of psychological villainy: the hero, crippled emotionally when his second wife dies in childbirth, raises his infant daughter in her mother's cold image, and thwarts all the child's efforts to break free of his oppressive love. But swathed about this core is an unbelievable amount of mustachioed melodrama. The novel's major fault is that, for the greater part of its length, the major actors glide about like decapitated ghosts searching for their heads, scaring the daylights out of onlookers but affecting each other not at all.

Coming after 29-year-old Author Feibleman's exceptional first novel, A Place Without Twilight (TIME, March 3, 1958), the new book is a disappointment. But for all its melodrama and its occasional flavor of Charles Addams under the magnolias, it is still well worth reading. Feibleman is a fine stylist who almost never gets his hands sticky. He sees people shrewdly, and can set down small scenes with great poignancy. The episode that ends the book is a masterpiece--even though it parodies the whole novel and the entire Southern school of literary fungus munchers. After the hero dies, a dotty old aunt is sent to an asylum, where a doctor sets her to knitting a scarf. "The scarf is measured on Monday of each week," reports Author Feibleman, "and this is not a simple matter. It is now thirty-five feet long."

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