THE WEIR

I liked this -- and yet I can't see it as an easy book to sell. It is a fragment of life and background and individuals brought sharply into focus, so convincingly that it seems drawn from intimate knowledge of a place and a people. The place is an island off the coast of Maine; the people, the handful of families that had their living from the sea, and made their homes, out of long habit, on the island. And yet-through most of them -- runs a restlessness, born of an awareness that their way of life has not kept pace with the mainland, that perhaps they should want to escape. But it is chiefly the story of Hardy, who hated the weir, which gave him his living; of his wife, Josie, who had known another background, but found her roots deep in the island life; of Leonard who was staunch and true and the two younger children who were trouble-makers; and of Gram, Hardy's old mother, sharp-tongued and sharp-eyed. It is the story too of their neighbors, good friends, backbiters, gossipers and haters. And of the which brought both life and death. It is a vivid book which pulls you into the pattern of these little lives. Well done and readable, a good bit of contemporary America.