From Esm

UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM by John Hersey. 245 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $4.95.

Novelist John Hersey has always fished for big themes, but they have not always stayed hooked. The Child-Buyer, a biting commentary on science worship, was flawed by too much special pleading. White Lotus, a parable about a white slave in yellow China, lacked credibility. Too Far to Walk was an entertaining but glib recital of the Faust story transplanted to a campus. In this novel Hersey solidly hooks his quarry and his reader. Under the Eye of the Storm is his best book since A Bell for Adano; it ranks among the top fiction of the season.

Braced by a strong narrative drive and steeped in a true sailor's feel for boats and blue water, Storm roils with energy; the tropical hurricane Esme, through which Hersey's characters sail, leaves the reader waterlogged and groping for the shore. The shriek of the wind that lashes the 32-ft. yawl Harmony makes a good sea story all by itself. But there is thematic cargo aboard, too. Hersey is writing of the truths that men see in one another. All people nurture private myths, he is saying, and those myths include images of themselves as distorted as fun-house mirrors.

Dr. Meticulous. Aboard the Harmony, sailing from Martha's Vineyard to Block Island, the author pipes two couples; the Medlars and the Hamdens. Their problems are not inventive, but the familiarity of their troubles is not so much a weakness of the narrative as a strength: the four aging young moderns are all too typical of the here and now.

At 34, Harmony's owner, Dr. Thomas Medlar, is already a "respectfully whispered name in liver circles." He is a hepatologist who finds the human liver "the source of his income and dismay." The world ashore he sees as overcrowded, violent, unjust, and populated by men who are failures. Harmony gives the doctor "a kind of intoxication by quiet." He frets endlessly over fittings, halyards, logbooks. Being exact in little things is his way of getting through life, "busily, painlessly, and even much of the time, in high good humor." To his wife, he is "Dr. Meticulous." Audrey Medlar is everybody's next-door neighbor's wife. Her husband comes home bushed, doesn't talk to her enough, and she is getting wrinkles in her neck.

Fun & Games. While Tropical Storm Esme is brewing, Flicker Hamden and | his wife Dot come aboard Harmony for the cruise. Dottie, with her "sweater and pearls mentality," is a weak, giddy girl; Flicker, too dashing, too open, too entertaining, too well-liked, can be trusted with friendship but not with one's daughter or sister or wife. A "social engineer" who lives in a Buck Rogers world of computers and servo-mechanisms, he is strictly a cocktail-party sailor; he carps about the absence of the latest communications gadgets, revels in his irreverence for the sea and for the sailor's worship of his craft.

While Flicker enlists the two wives in a dark conspiracy of fun and games directed against the skipper, Medlar himself battens Harmony's hatches and gear until "everything but the cotter pins of his own life" seems secure. Thus they await the storm--with the wind blowing in the rigging, "and nothing to say to each other."

Twin squalls strike, both human and tropical. The sea around the two couples, and within them, spills menacingly. Seen through Tom Medlar's eyes, as he fights Esme out there on the raging water, relationships hurtle on a collision course. Are Flick and Audrey hiding some amatory escapade? Did Dottie try to murder Audrey? The recollections become a sort of occidental Rashomon, in which each survivor discovers his own truth about himself and his shipmates. Hersey's final ironies are choice enough to deserve each reader's fresh discovery. Only a rat fink like Flicker Hamden would squeal prematurely.

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