When You're 11 the World Is an Enemy

By Don Robertson

Wendall Oler is a skinny, blinking, baleful little boy who trusts the human race about as far as he can throw it. His mother is dead, and he doesn't particularly care. His father is in the Army, and he doesn't particularly care about that, either.

The year is 1944, and Wen dall Oler is 11, and he has all the charm of an embalmed cassawary. Reluctantly, fighting it every inch of the way, he is living in a small Vermont town with his maternal grandparents, his motorcycle-mad uncle,

his beautiful aunt and a despised little cousin, son of the aunt.

But gradually a change overtakes the verminous little Wendall Oler, and it is this change that provides the substance of John Nichols' magical and impas-

sioned new novel, The Wizbut it was as nothing comard of Loneliness (Putnam, pared with The Wizard of $5.95). It is a marvelous Loneliness. The earlier loving heart, and one hopes comic-opera college love afbook, the cry of a sweet and book, which described it gets the large audience it fair, was a bit too glib and deserves. Salinger-ish to be fully effective, but it certainly signaled great things to come.

NICHOLS, WHO at 25 is almost too young to be writing such a fine book, made rather a sensational debut last year with a novel called "The Sterile Cuckoo." It was a commendable effort,

Now, with The Wizard of Loneliness, the first of the rived. Richly comic, aboundgreat things has Indeed aring in decency (in the largest and finest sense), never reluctant to wear its heart on its sleeve and proclaim its passions straightforwardly, this is a novel to be remembered and cherished.

THE CHANGE in Wendall Oler takes place in a period of about a year and a half. It is characterized by terror (an insane war hero returns: to the town, hides in the railroad station), gut-thumping humor (there is a skunk hunt to end all skunk hunts), pathos (the town librarian, a buck-toothed homosexual, is one of the novel's finest : characters), and, finally, a sort of tragedy (the grandfather, a lovingly ineffectual doctor of generous impulses that forever are being misinterpreted by his wife, inadvertantly is responsible for the mad war hero's death).

Nichols' use of rhetoric is breathtaking, astonishing. There are, flaws in the book. Sometimes it is a bit too didactic. But they don't really matter. The point is-the young man has created a thing of warmth and loveli-

ness.