Empty Circles

IN ORBIT by Wright Morris. 153 pages. New American Library. $3.95.

In his 14th novel, Wright Morris recounts a day's events in a small Indiana town just before a twister hits. As a slice of life, the book is thin indeed, and coming from Morris (The Field of Vision, Love Among the Cannibals), it is exasperating. The familiar elements are there: the pointless plot, the Twain tone of Midwest innocence and irony, the fey and the freak who get caught up in the drama. Morris has used them all before, often to great comic effect. This time he has barely bothered to construct more than the outline of a story, leaning on the kitschy existential slogan: "Things just happen. No reason, no reason, just a happening."

What happens is that a high school dropout roars through town on a motorcycle stolen from a friend, and stops long enough to rape a harmless local halfwit. No one cares very much, but gentle ripples of consequence eventually reach the local newspaper editor, a shopkeeper, a waitress, an "alienated" college professor and his wife Charlotte, who is one of those beautiful, charming, spontaneous nature girls so dear to the hearts of intellectual novelists. The sparse action is accompanied by heavy circular symbolism: the motorcycle wheels, the twister, Charlotte's abandoned whirling dance, bees circling around the half-wit in numbers that ought to discourage any rapist. In the end, the reader is left going around in circles too.

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