THE VIEW FROM POMPEY'S HEAD

His best book- and one that seems to sum up what he has been saying in the others. He has achieved the unification of past and present, a stream of the psychology of the Old South into the New, reaching out tentacles to strangle, to forbid escape. Anson Page thought he had escaped Pompey's Head. He was a successful lawyer, partner in a firm handling primarily publishers' affairs. He wasn't expecting to be sent back on a ticklish mission to his boyhood home, there to use- if opportunity could be seized-contacts of his youth to break through the barriers around a certain New York publisher's mystery author. The author's wife had made an unbearable charge against a now dead, highly regarded editor. Page was to go to the author himself, and find out the truth. The thread of mystery, a sort of Search for Corve keeps the reader at a high pitch of tension, the while Page renews his youth; and the patterns of a Southern town, where ancestor worship supplies a springboard even today, takes tangible form. Brief encounter with half forgotten emotions flares into substance as Dinah Blackford, little sister of his closest friend, proves in maturity still the half-sensed girl of his dreams -- too late for either of them. And the answer the mystery? Page learned that answer, too painful a one to share, but took back to New York a substitute designed to placate the gods....Overlong, perhaps, but never dull, this ranks high in the season's output.