Love in Commuterland

A PEAK IN DARIEN (252 pp.)--Roswell G. Ham Jr.--Putnam ($3.50).

Forty is the age of saints and suicides, according to Critic Cyril Connolly. Neither the idea nor the particular fates would ever have occurred to Maynard Wallace ("Wink1') Marshall, an urbane NBS nightly newscaster whose voice-charmed life demonstrates "how well a reasonably brainy man can do if he just doesn't use his brains.'' However. Wink does have an age problem, and it is all tied up with sex and suburbia.

At 42, Wink is a recent widower and an inveterate girl watcher. The girl is Virginia Jackson, a witchingly lovely item who appears on a neighboring Darien. Conn, porch each morning in a shimmering blue robe to serve breakfast to her father, a bar-car contemporary of Wink's. She is just 22. and whether the twain can mate is the fulcrum of this wry comedy of commuterland. In establishing squatter's rights on the Peter De Vries-John Cheever territory. Author Roswell G. Ham Jr. (Fish Flying Through Air) is a trifle unsure of himself, but he has some of the same deft flair for eyedropping vermouth into the suburban martini.

Free Fall. Before he has properly begun to hope, Wink begins to grope--with Virginia's wrist watch--at the local beach club. The assembled giddy-biddies pick the pair's backbones in whispers. But love, naturally, has wax in its ears. Novelist Ham knows the language lovers speak, a pottage of mush and banalities, and he is not above using it. He justifies the "I love yous" by capturing the feeling of the roller-coaster slide into passion, that breath-catching dive in which a man and a woman cannot help themselves and do not want to. Indeed. Wink and Gin are so romantically in love that they do not sleep together, a refreshingly archaic innovation for the modern novel.

Unfortunately, this gives Wink time for some rueful reflections. After all, he remembers the New England hurricane of 1938, before Gin was two. He remembers Benny Goodman, and he cannot forget Freud and girls who marry father surrogates. Then there is Gin's mother. As a penthouse-mistress of the theater and TV set with a not-so-secret yen for Wink, she resents a marriage that will blight the promise of adultery. What with mother and some complicated skulduggery back at the NBS network, it sometimes seems that the rice will never fly, but it does.

Status Eking. Author Ham laces the willful charm of his love story with a carbonated commentary on suburbanitis, with its worship of errant gadgets (" 'Patent applied for' but never to be granted, I trust"), anxious affluence ("We had enough trouble living 10% over our income"), status eking ("If the price was down around $17,000--in Darien that meant one room and an outhouse on a twenty-by-twenty lot under the New Haven Railroad tracks") and nostalgic concupiscence ("There hasn't been an organized wife-swapping party in Darien or New Canaan for five years. All we do is grow gardens, take the kids sailing, and drink"). Author Ham has pluck, as his Keats-cribbed title shows, but perhaps he should have changed it to "A Peek."

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