Homecoming

THE WATERS OF KRONOS (176 pp.)--Conrad Richter--Knopf ($3.50).

Life and literature are not as far apart as some critics like to believe, and few books seem truer to life than those in which the author indulges his nostalgia. Writers as various as Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe and James Thurber separately discovered that "you can't go home again." In The Waters of Kronos, Novelist Conrad Richter adds an extra dimension to this truism. His hero grasps what countless other men have sensed: you can never really leave home. Novelist Richter has written a dozen books (The Trees, The Fields, The Town) in which the American grain stands out like a pledge of authenticity. His latest is guaranteed, with all its flecks of sentimentality, to stir any reader who has ever tried to break away from his home town.

When John Donner tries to return from the West to his birthplace in Pennsylvania, he is an old man, and Unionville has long been under the waters of a huge hydroelectric dam. Donner has been ill, and he is perhaps a little unbalanced as well. The local graveyards were moved up to high ground when the valley was flooded, and as he stands before the graves of his family, Donner is swept away by memories. In his fevered imagination, his boyhood Unionville exists again. He walks the streets, peers into houses, recognizes old friends and acquaintances. He even visits his father's store, and there an old confusion leaves him helpless to speak his feelings. Like many a boy, he had never been able to bridge the distance between himself and his father. Now, as he relives the situation as an old man, the gap seems hardly narrowed. Was his father his enemy, or was he what he seemed to the rest of the town, a cheery backslapper with embarrassing cliches and Biblical quotations?

As Donner's memory reaches full crest, a whole town passes in review--the poor, the well to do, the occasional suicide or murderer, the eccentric, and underneath all, a solid support of hard work, kindliness, Pennsylvania Dutch stubbornness and no-nonsense Lutheranism. Now Don ner knows that he loved all this. To the love for his mother, the constant in his life, is now added an insight far different from and more imaginative than the anti-daddy theme so often at the heart of current fiction: "That all those disturbing things seen and felt in the father, which as a boy had given him an uncomprehending sense of dread and hostility, were only intimations of his older self to come, a self marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth."

On its simplest level, The Waters of Kronos is a long way from being original, but Author Richter's treatment of his story is, and his style has the pleasurable maturity of old wine. Like most mature writers, he has turned, at 69, to the secret recapitulations that round out a lifetime; almost of necessity he is grave, but never boring.

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