SPRING HARVEST

Most of the recent novels set in college communities have had a somewhat cynical intellectuality. This is a warmly human story, with its own authenticity, its own small town problems, its own cast of average men and women, rather than typed professionals. Alden Prescott of the Geology Department, to be sure, is an arrogant, spoiled dictator, who makes life very difficult for his charming wife, on whose understanding and capability the community depends, and for the daughter, too much like her father for her own good. And Mark Allingham, head of the department of music, has counted too much on his star pupil, and finds his hopes crash around him when he is confronted with her pregnancy and cannot go on to the heights he envisioned. President Wallace, married emotionally to the college he serves, as recompense for the cold, hard wife, whose ambitions are more material than commensurate with life as a college president's helpmeet; suddenly finds that there is another side of life, though perhaps hopelessly unattainable. Circumstances play into his hands almost too conveniently at the end. And finally there is Dr. Jim, a leavening factor in the lives of all of them. There's young romance and middle aged romance here, along with the problems and issues that come to a head in the college's spring term. A good feel of life in a middle western college town, written by an author whose friends are legion through the Stillmeadow books and the long term Diary of Domesticity.