RUNNING TOWARDS LIFE

Mrs. Hobbs who has previously run about pre-ping-pong Red China, India, and the inner complexities of Women's Lib (Love and Liberation, 1970) now floodlights another existential corner -- semi-wilderness family life. The Hobbs family -- husband Jack and two young sons live on a lovely inlet of twenty inhabitants off the west coast of Vancouver Island. There are the usual, not uninteresting, details of coping with household requisites and cranky machinery between the bi-weekly trips of the coastal mail steamer. But Mrs. Hobbs is not one to allow hitherto unavailable joys or untilled doubts to lie tallow. She jumps on the conservation bandwagon with a bound brisk enough to shatter the axles: ""To market century old trees for last Sunday's paper. . . ."" And returning from paradise after a sojourn, Lisa sees American sub-suburbia in a new focus: ""Dear Heavens, were these The People? . . . dressed in shorts, with broad beams swaying to and fro between the ketchup and the cornflakes?"" Then it's ho lot the wilderness again, in spite of some Lib doubts and guilt about copping out, to simply ""experience"" -- silence, natural beauty, inner rhythms, and each other. Punctuated by the yipping discoveries of Mrs. Hobbs. likable and ferociously experiencing.