Of Yo-Yos & Other Magic

STOP-TIME by Frank Conroy. 304 pages. Viking. $5.95.

"Like most children," writes Frank Conroy in this precocious autobiography, "I was anti-sentimental and quick to hear false notes."

With little sentimentality and few false notes, Conroy, now 31 and a freelance writer, describes a kind of Huck Finn-Holden Caulfield boyhood and coming of age in Florida, Connecticut and Manhattan, in the midst of a rather eccentric family. It is the most obvious of themes, but Conroy brings it off remarkably well, with an almost archaic narrative skill.

In the scrubby wilds near Fort Lauderdale, he wanders untrammeled through woods and dunes, killing king snakes, munching Powerhouse candy bars. He regards mysteries of life with the eerie moral neutrality of boyhood. "Suddenly two of the birds rush at each other in the air. Quick as a wink, one of them is gone. Swallowed. A single yellow feather drifts down to settle on the moss. I laugh, delighted by the purity of it." In a familiar childhood rite, he discovers the intricate magic of a yo-yo that he has bought from two Oriental itinerant salesmen, and learns the various movements--"walking the dog," "loop the loops" and a dazzling number called "the universe."

As he ages into adolescence, Conroy confronts all its standard humiliations and the ache of sex. Maturing fitfully, he falls in love with reading, then with writing, and tells himself one day: "I'm a novelist! What a beautiful thing to be able to say." To judge from these promising and prismatic memoirs, Conroy will certainly be able to say it before long.

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