Books: Frank's Heaven

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THE BRIDEGROOM GOMETH—Waldo Frank—Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Waldo Frank, 47, is an inverted Theodore Dreiser, a modern transcendentalist, a mystical Marxist. He is also, at times and in spots, a forceful novelist. Combining passion and penetration with plodding Joycean prose and purblind bookishness, he is a perfect layer cake of the admirable and the irritating.

His best book because it is his clearest and most interesting, The Bridegroom Cometh "dramatizes [says Frank] in flesh and blood the loss of the religious instinct in modern American life, and both the need and the promise of its triumphant rebirth." It is really a sequel: all of Frank's writing is focused on the search for a new religion.

The story's allegorical heroine is an intense, average-looking girl named Mary, daughter of a hard-bitten New England religious fanatic. A literal believer in Christ's Second Coming, in college Mary loses her faith because of a sociology professor, finds college boys a miserable substitute. Likewise synthetic is her marriage to a rich, cultured Jew. Renouncing his comfortable world, she seeks the true faith in vain in a factory, among the Communists, in an affair with a psychiatrist. Salvation comes when she meets David Markand, hero of Author Frank's last novel and Mary's New-Adam counterpart. Through her love for him, plus a beyond-Communism social faith, she finds new symbols for her long-lost religious faith.

The Bridegroom Cometh better dramatizes Mary's loss of faith than her rebirth. But it is provocative testimony to Author Frank's thesis that U. S. life is deeply grained with religious tradition.