Love Among the Ruins

THE DORP by"Frieda Arkin. 360 pages. Dial. $6.95.

Frieda Arkin has found a real, snug little place for herself in northern New York State, name of Kuyper's Dorp. Halfway between the Adirondacks and the Catskills. Or--if you prefer to chart it on another map--halfway between the delicate perceptions of Our Town and the guff of Peyton Place.

Up to now a craftswomanly short story writer, Miss Arkin in this book has not so much composed a novel as arranged a tableau, then methodically violated it with sudden disasters. Give Miss Arkin a road and she'll give you an accident. Give her a decent storm and she'll burn at least one house down. Give her a lovable set of old bones and bingo, bango, she'll supply a fatal disease and buy the funeral.

There is no design to The Dorp, no misguided attempt to unify it around a central character or theme. It all flaps as loosely (and engagingly) as the gossip columns of a small-town newspaper. The author obediently follows the ancient code of the village novelist. Her spinsters come in only two styles: dotty or drunk. Her clergyman predictably wrestles with doubt. The young girls are either uptight virgins or "fast." Most of the time the novel seems to take place--and to be written--around the turn of the century.

"What was the village doing at such an hour?" Miss Arkin likes to ask herself periodically. Well, Country Editor J. C. Barrows could be playing chess as usual. Old Helen Trombley, the town hypochondriac, could be counting her twinges to old Vebber Stevens at the pig farm. Elizabeth Rust, who truly loves her husband, might be making love to Jimmy Clancy at the motel. Down by the quarry, Kenneth Borgstrom, a schoolboy, might be making love to Eunice Dewsnap, a nurse. And Tony DiLuzio, teen-age Lothario, might be making love to just about anybody just about anywhere.

It isn't Winesburg, Ohio. Rather it is soap opera, a sort of superserial in which the lovable characters are sometimes handled with such consummate affection by the author, with such descriptive refinement of feeling that it approaches art. Of course, there are those organ-tone poems about the seasons. Characters inexplicably appear and just as inexplicably disappear. Chapter after chapter goes absolutely nowhere. But the reader gets hooked nevertheless.

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