Amazing Grace

By Melvin Maddocks

THE UPSTART by PIERS PAUL READ 335 pages. Lippincott. $7.95.

Imagine a 1970s Heathcliff sitting in the study of Wuthering Heights, dressed in a country gentleman's tweeds. He has spent the morning keeping tab on his prosperous estate. Now, while his beautiful young wife and chil dren await him for 5 o'clock tea, he neatly taps on an electric typewriter his dark history of humiliation, vengeance and-- since he is a Catholic convert--reform.

In The Upstart, Piers Paul Read, novelist son of the distinguished British critic Sir Herbert Read, certainly sounds more like the child of a match between Emily Bronte and Graham Greene. He may fall shy of Bronte's storms on the English heath and Greene's storms in the Christian heart.

Still, as readers of Monk Dawson and The Professor's Daughter already know, he can roll a mean thunderclap and make it spell damnation.

Read's Heathcliff is not a stableboy but a contemporary Yorkshire parson's son who sulks because God did not make him an aristocrat. At times, an American reader is hard put to take Hil ary Fletcher's miseries as solemnly as he does himself-- even if one grants that a second-rate British public school is "worse than prison" and that hell knows no torment like an Englishman at the hunt ball whose jacket fails to fit. Alas, The Upstart stipulates that exactly this sort of class embarrassment can still drive a dated Angry Young Man to organize ten years of his life so that he may debauch the daughters of the neighboring lord of the manor in their silk-sheeted beds, wipe out the son's inheritance at roulette and, with a nasty sneer, take over the manor himself.

As melodrama--subtitle it The Snob's Revenge--Read's romance twirls its waxed mustaches too wickedly. (In training for his major villainies, the parson's son also steals, pimps, and drowns a newborn baby.) Read's true gothic gift is for translating melodrama into a morality play: plotting on tabloid pulp paper while commenting on the finest India leaf. It is as a study of repentance that Read's story demands to be taken seriously.

The moral premise of The Upstart is that good and evil develop simultaneously within a human being, though only the saint mask or, as in Hilary's case, the sinner mask may be visible at one time. How does innocence survive its season of corruption? That is the question Read raises, and because he is an ambitious writer, he dares to risk absurdity by answering them with a climax that builds toward one word: grace.

Read has his reward. Cleverer, subtler novels read like a dream--and are just as instantly forgotten. The Upstart reads, at moments, like a near parody. But it impresses on a reader's mind, as sharply as a medieval block print, the shape of the author's conscience.

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