Eloquent First Novel Is Too Urgent to Miss

By Don Robertson

One of the Children Is Crying (Random House; $5.95), a steamy and simmering and abundantly eloquent first novel by a young man named Coleman Dowell, is by no means a perfect book. In places it is discursive, and in places the author loses control of his rhetoric.

But these strictures are of no real importance. Dowell is a born writer, a natural writer unafraid of blood and anguish and the darker passions. And nowhere does he take a cheap or easy view of people and their emotions. His novel is at once complex and profound, melodramatic in the best sense, a creation of horror

and beauty and awful grief.

THE SETTING is a Southern border state, probably Kentucky. The time is the present. A scabrous old rip named Murdoch McChesney has just died. The novel examines the wreckage he has left behind . . . human wreckage in the form of his widow and six children.

of a family-one certainly worthy of the talents of a Tennessee Williams or Carson McCullers.

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BUT, and this must be emphasized, no one behaves predictably. The death of Murdoch McChesney brings strength to the weak and weakness to the the strong. And, finally and inevitably, the family is divided into the survivors and the destroyed. The drama nowhere relents. The layers come off. Truth emerges, and it is not pretty, but it is truth, and therefore it has value.

As does this flawed, urgent, warm blooded and terrifying novel. No one who professes an interest in contemporary literature can afford to miss it. To Colea large sa. man Dowell

One son Robin, is a drunkard. Another, Jasper, is a loudmouthed pragmatist and bigot whose success in, lute. business cannot hide his basic emptiness. One daughter. a beautiful model named Millicent, is a Lesbian. AnOther, Erin, is an old maid. And then there is poor Priscilla, who is just plain crazy. And, finally, there is Rhoda, who at least on the surface appears to be a normal housewife who has made her peace with her own ambition and her husband's mediocrity.

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Add to this cast Murdoch McChesney's widow, mousy little farm woman who (at least temporarily) finds unaccustomed strength in her bereavement, and you have a fine moiling zoo