Radicals & Working Stiffs

TELL ME A RIDDLE (156 pp.)--Til He 'Olsen--Lippincott ($3.50).

Author Tillie Olsen, 48, could not get around to writing until after raising a family of four daughters. This is her total published work: four short stories. They were worth waiting for.

The title story is the longest and most ambitious, and tells of an aging couple who gave their lives to social protest and now find themselves shipwrecked with their radical passions in an affluent society they never made. Their occasional meetings with old comrades for reminiscent talk of "hunger, secret meetings, human rights'' are continually interrupted by the grandchildren shouting "Commercial's on; any Coke left?'' The grandfather, staring at his own strange descendants who have never hungered, wonders uneasily just how the dream came true, and why it is not more satisfying. The central figures, with their bickering love for each other, their constant turning to the dark past when, at least, they had "a sense of mattering,'' are as delicately done as a perfect fugue.

Nebraska-born Tillie Olsen, whose father was for 30 years state secretary of the Socialist Party, writes with compassionate knowledge of the radical immigrants and the working stiffs who fought the big industrial battles of the early 20th century. Married to a West Coast longshoreman and union leader, she finally found the time six years ago to take a class in creative writing at Stanford University, has since won an O. Henry award and a Ford Foundation grant.

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