LONESOME VALLEY

Ten years brought Johnny Baker full circle, back to another fresh start in the hollow in the Kentucky hills from which he had run away to Richmond and school and college, only to find the pull back to the hills too much for him. This is Johnny's story -- not so much the story of what happens, for most of that is given in flashbacks as he thinks over his feelings about what happened. But the story of his lonesomeness, his sense of being misunderstood and unwanted, of his need for happiness. The Marcums were more his ""folks"" than his own uncle and aunt with whom he lived, and it was Crit he told when he decided to run away from home. A brief interlude of happiness- as he went to the country school and knew Hazel, the teacher's sister, and loved her as a teen age boy could love. And then the city, education hardly won, teaching him little of life, the disillusion of his affair with Edna, the turndown of the job offered at his graduation, and his return to the hollow- and eventually to Hazel. There's slow motion in the telling of the story -- there's the feel of the people and the countryside -- and the style somehow has the flavor of the vernacular without the form. Not an important book, except in introducing a new writer who reaches a measure of distinction.