SKYLIGHT

Country boy meets rich girl and gets burned in this melancholy, faintly comic novel. While his father struggles to make ends meet, Buddy tastes the good life, courtesy of Phoebe Crouch and her wacky, well-to- do family. Buddy enjoys traveling in Phoebe's wake; she loans him her MGB when she goes off to Smith, pays the initial deposit after he is accepted at Amherst, and finds an apartment so that they can live together. Then Buddy learns that Phoebe is sleeping around while he's at work, and it's suddenly all over. He flees back to Michigan to take a job at a filling station, discovers the pleasures of hard drink and duck hunting, and enrolls at the university in order to escape the draft (this is 1965). Buddy, class valedictorian and, ultimately, good ol' boy, has a narrow, unexamined set of values. His story is peopled with oddballs, small-minded or tired men, and caricatures of women- -libidinous, dishonest Phoebe, her passive mother, and an older woman who repeatedly propositions him; the only dependable female here is a devoted dog named Abigail. Meanwhile, Driscoll sends a series of clear but dismal messages about trusting women, crossing class boundaries, and setting goals. (Fiction. YA)