GOOD LUCK, MISS WYCKOFF

Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, is what everyone says to her when she's ridden out of the town of Freedom, Kansas, for having had what would be called, in her spinster-schoolteacher-romantic-literary frame of limited reference, carnal congress. . . with a young black athlete. He's also the maintenance man in the high school where she has taught with such conviction and dedication. This is William Inge's first novel--almost a one act novel--and certainly very reminiscent of all that he has apotheosized in his plays, whether the loneliness at any midwestern small town Bus Stop or the Dark at the Top of the Stairs. As everyone with some constraint says goodbye to her (her roommate, her landlady, the principal) Miss Wyckoff remembers in frightened, trapped humiliation and abandonment the circumstances which led to the episodes in the schoolroom: her spiralling depression; her visit to Dr. Neal who indicated the atrophy of her unwanted, unused body; the trips to a psychiatrist of no particular solace; etc., etc. This then is a chaste and flawless cameo of one of those small lives of quiet desperation. Miss Wyckoff learns that good luck ""constitutes her only hope for the future"" and that she'll need lots of it. So do books like this which may be just as ill at ease and out of phase in the modern world. . . . Good luck, Miss Wyckoff.