The Summer of '28

By John Skow

DANDELION WINE

by RAY BRADBURY 269 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Burn all high school yearbooks, tell loathsome lies to old roommates who telephone after 20 years, on pain of black despair avoid sentimental journeys to childhood beer gardens, and never, never reread Look Homeward, Angel. But here comes Science Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury's magical boyhood novel Dandelion Wine, republished in a new edition after 19 years. Is its magic powerful enough to make it young again, or is its neck corded and scrawny in the collar of that new dust jacket?

Reviewers are paid to take these terrible risks and the report here, offered a little shakily, is that Dandelion Wine is fine and new and rare. The novel is a giddy leap into nostalgia, and maybe that is why it works as well now as it ever did.

Bradbury begins with an unbeatable bit of boyish goofiness not 500 words long. It is the summer of 1928 and twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding wakes up in his cupola bedroom, high above his grandparents' house in "Green Town," the author's own Waukegan, Ill. The boy knows his duty: to wake the town. Silently, he commands, " 'Everyone yawn. Everyone up.' The great house stirred below. 'Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass!' He waited a decent interval. 'Grandma and Great Grandma, fry hot cakes!' The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty hall ... 'Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! ... The sun began to rise. He folded his arms and smiled a magician's smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. It'll be a fine season.' "

Buying new sneakers, without which summer cannot begin at all. Hanging the porch swing, gathering dandelion blossoms, pressing them, adding rain water and waiting for the bubbles of fermentation. A friend leaves town. An old man dies. Grandma cooks a mighty belly-boggling, legendary dinner. Douglas gets sick and lies loony and limp. He gets well. He and his brother rocket around town, crazy with motion. He hides, quiet, in the dark bed of ferns beside the porch, listening to the drone of grown-up voices; cigar ends glow in the dusk. His new sneakers fade, streak, scuff, and at last lose their amazing power. Pencils and notebooks appear in the dime-store window: school lurks. The porch swing is taken down. And the summer of 1928 is over.

That's all. The book is short like a summer; blink twice and it's gone. Thanks to the publisher for bringing it back. Now, let's have J.B. Pick's The Last Valley again. And John Graves' Goodbye to a River and Journey Into Fear. Charles Morgan's Sparkenbroke. Even Look Homeward, Angel. Riches untold, retold. Terrible risks. sbJohn Skow

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