MORNING IS A LONG TIME COMING

In some ways this sequel to Summer of My German Soldier (1973) is superfluous: although it's 1950 and six years since she harbored a German POW, Patty Bergen is essentially unchanged. She's still nursing emotional wounds inflicted by her unloving parents; still trying to absorb the lesson of the first book--that she is a ""person of value."" And once again she's shocked all of Jenkinsville, Arkansas, with another ""treasonous"" act--her decision to live in Europe on the $1000 graduation check from her grandparents. Although you can easily see why Patty wants to put a lot of distance between herself and all the painful associations of home, it's impossible to credit the underlying reason for the jaunt, namely her obsession with ""adopting"" dead Anton Reiker's family--""I want Anton's mother to be my mother too."" En route to Gottingen, Patty acquires a peptic ulcer plus a ""rakishly handsome"" Parisian lover; but, oddly, the further Greene takes her heroine from Jenkinsville, the less substantial people and places seem. And Party's final destination--a muzzy scene in which she learns Frau Reiker is already dead--only proves what she herself has admitted from the start: that she's always had a very loving, nurturing mother in her old black nanny Ruth. No revelations then, just a repetition of earlier truths; but by the sheer urgency of her feelings--insistently self-absorbed, deadly earnest, and almost totally humorless--Patty makes herself a force to contend with on this misdirected rite of passage.