WINE OF THE COUNTRY

This novel has a better chance to give Basso a popular market than anything else he has written. It is a psychological novel of marriage, which has enough plot to carry the interest over dissertations on anthropological and philosophical reactions to the state of man and his world. Basso seemingly cannot resist these side excursions. This time, he has as main characters, an elderly anthropologist and a younger one, so he sets his stage properly. But aside from this (and many will find them interesting) it is a good story, an interesting situation with characters that live. The story is primarily the story of a love marriage that didn't work, of how jealousy, lack of balance, rigidity of viewpoint destroyed all that would have made for happiness. The setting shifts from New England, a college town, where the young wife is in her own environment, to South Carolina, where the husband's roots are deeper than even he had realized, and where she withdraws into herself. A good tale, well told.