Q. Con the U.S. Absorb 130 First Novelists a Year? A. No.

People have quixotic ways of seeking out the hard things in life--climbing Mount McKinley; pointing tiny boats through the high seas; getting married; commuting. Some special souls in search of a really refined form of self-punishment even begin to write. Each year only about 130 of them endure to achieve contracts from hardback publishing companies and so acquire the dubious title of "first novelists." And that is often only the beginning of their troubles.

This year, as usual, a handful of first novels arrived with the built-in interest that accompanies works by writers well established in other genres: Playwright William Inge's Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, the late John Gunther's Indian Sign, Poet James Dickey's Deliverance (TIME, April 20). A few more deal with a subject successfully chosen to titillate advance publicity. Felice Gordon, for instance, in The Pleasure Principle looks into the bed and bored accommodations of a beautiful and renowned American widow now wed to a Greek shipping magnate. Attractive Lois Gould, widow of a New York newspaperman, has created that city's most piquant putative roman a clef in years by writing her first novel about the wife of a New York art director who discovers that most of her girl friends loved her dying husband both too wisely and too well.

What happens to the rest of the crop has stirred David Segal, a New York editor who spends much of his time on first novelists, to suggest that publishers should invent a new word. "In the case of first novels," Segal says, "what happens shouldn't be called publishing. 'Privishing' would be a better way to put it." Some books are sent to reviewers without even the vital publication-date information or a glossy photograph of the author, which definitely increases the chance of a review in smaller papers. Jacket copy can be cretinous. The blurbs from other writers are often elliptical and overblown ("Not since Dostoevsky . . ."), demolishing what credibility they might normally possess. The authors' capsule biographies still tend to suggest that to become a novelist, a boy should first try life as a carpenter, cook, salesman and merchant seaman. Advertising budgets range from minuscule to nonexistent. Many publishers, in fact, will not advertise a first novel at all unless sales justify it on a percentage basis--a neat way to ensure there will be no sales to base percentages on.

These perennial problems are not the result of a conspiracy to suppress talent but of commercial realities. Statistically, there can be few less promising enterprises than a serious new first novel. By dint of great care and devotion --especially to getting convincing jacket blurbs from established writers--some publishers do make a little money on serious first novels. But even when properly handled, the average sale of a remarkably skillful book is not likely to run over 6.000 hardback copies. The best guess at an average is 3,500, with more than half of that sale coming from public libraries around the country.

A product time-and-motion study on the first novel from inception to marketing would drive any management consultant mad. The book spends, say, three years festering in the author's brain and typewriter. Often two years are required for going the rounds of agents and publishers (who hold a manuscript at least three months before rejecting it). Once the book is accepted, another year may be needed for ed iting, printing and distribution. When the product finally surfaces, it may hold a place in the crucial "shelf-time" period for only two or three days. Large bookstores are so heavily stocked that some well-reviewed first novels never get to the bookshelves at all.

Publishers, who periodically convene to contemplate the plight of the first novel with a melancholy akin to that so often displayed in the theater world over the perennial decline of Broadway, have considered various cures. Among them: better bookstores; special sales packages of three or four first novels together: a first-novel book club; mailorder contact with some constituency of youthful readers who are thought to care enough about serious, unheralded fiction to buy it.

Meanwhile, first novelists go on working, a continuing proof of the no doubt mad, but nevertheless encouraging notion that money isn't everything. Below is a look at some recent first novels. Their authors may or may not make a bestseller list, but they should be read.

PRINCIPATO by Tom McHale. 311 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Not since Tennessee Williams' no-necked Flynns from Memphis has there been such a terrible family of Irish-Americans as the Corrigans of Philadelphia--"a wealthy tribe of shanty Irish, they'd take the sweat from the poor dead Jesus." Principato, the beleaguered hero of this hilarious novel, finds out about the Corrigans the hard way by marrying Cynthia, the barge-footed only daughter of the clan. Battening off a string of funeral homes and ghetto bars, his in-laws scheme constantly within a parochial Jansenist world of indulgences and spiritual bouquets. For them, a family's social status is measured by the number of priests and nuns it has produced.

The offspring of Principato's union with Cynthia have "sallow skins and strange russet-colored hair" and answer to the jig-prompting names of Terrance, Sean. Noreen. Aloysius and Kathleen. To their Italian fathers dismay, they avoid the sun like moles, playing sourly in the shade or roaming dark hallways. Principato blunders through eleven years among this dreadful crew until his father, dying of cancer, announces that he will not mend his 35-year rift with Holy Mother Church and, far more shocking, intends to be cremated. The scandalized Corrigans mount a frenzied campaign to scoop old Principato into a sanctified casket--but only manage to ruin his son's life.

Author McHale, 28, can tell off urban Catholics, from the bishops down to the Holy Name members, with the familiarity of a devout housewife telling off her rosary beads. A recent graduate (Temple, class of '63) who teaches writing at Monmouth College, N.J.. he already has a formidable mastery of technique, as well as a deeper insight into the clash between time and eternity.

... IN THE HIGHLANDS SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL by Joanna Osfrovv. 306 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Joanna Ostrow is one of those writers who seem to have been born with every insight, every comma in place. Her book lies far beyond such usual first-novel adjectives as "promising." A classically perfect little story, it polarizes an encounter between the frantic present and an almost still-life past.

Simon, son of a Belfast prostitute and a black, is the child of modern chaos personified. After a number of false starts, he enters college in Edinburgh where he learns that his foster father is in the hospital and his foster mother has been left alone on their Highlands farm, the croft, where he was brought up. Packing up his wife and two small children, Simon returns to his heritage-by-adoption.

It is a cold, bleak, yet harshly absorbing little universe, with absolutely no future. The croft is an anachronism, like the Gaelic that Simon's foster parents still speak occasionally--"a whole language and no world left to make sense of it." Overhead R.A.F. jets streak the sky. On the pantry shelf, instant oatmeal has scandalously appeared. And the once stout cottage, Simon discovers, is being eaten by woodworms. Eden is crumbling into something like a badly maintained folklore museum.

But was it ever Eden, really? Miss Ostrow explores the fine distinction between a search for roots and a return to the womb. Her range of style matches her breadth of feeling. She can move from a tweeds-and-walking-shoes prose while writing about a hare-and-hound hunt to a kind of mod Jane Austen.

Miss Ostrow, 32, is a native New Yorker who lived in Scotland in the early 1960s and now has settled, with her husband and two small daughters, on a farm in Canada. Obviously she is miles beyond the romantic simplicities of Celtic revivalism. She is in the presence of death, and she knows it. Her achievement is to show that when tradition dies, it can affect the swinging young even more than the hidebound old.

THE CONVERSION by Victor Perera. 307 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

No country is wholly safe from an invasion by that familiar character of American-Jewish fiction, the academic rabbi manque who is Talmudically attempting to work out an identity crisis. In The Conversion, Professor Victor Perera, a lecturer at Vassar, sends a modern Jew, whose Sephardic ancestors were expelled by the Inquisition in 1492, back to Spain for the treatment. Protagonist Stanley Bendana is ostensibly on a graduate grant to write his M.A. thesis (its title: Byzantine Conventions in Cervantes and Their Influence on 17th Century English Pastoral Poetry). Actually, Bendana is off on a jaunty windmill whirl of role playing. With Sancho Pan-za-like fidelity, he performs as the hypocrite Jew to a cracked canon's private inquisition, acts as a male Galatea to the less-than-female girl of his seminar dreams, tries out as incestuous brother to a brothel sister, and winds up as surrogate son to an Auschwitz graduate. That last role bestows upon him a final benediction, the sovereign sense of self.

Much is genuinely funny in Perera's saga of a guilt-ridden innocent abroad. Bendana has a mad. malapropriate sister, who feels "like a fish in Coca-Cola" instead of a fish out of water. He finds himself standing on the road before a brothel "tallying figures in his head, wondering uneasily if they would take a traveler's check." There are lapses, of course. Perera slumps toward collegiate humor or into yuks too obviously derived from the new school of American-Jewish humor. His story line suffers the common affliction of the picaresque novel, midsection-al sag. But Perera always shows a lively talent and, if not yet a full-blown Bellow, his is a most promising puff.

SNAKES by At Young. 149 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.95.

Any first novel that is about growing up, being a ghetto black and setting out on a career in the rock-blues world would seem to be artistically disadvantaged from the start. Snakes, without

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