Books: Through the Hedge

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RED SKY AT MORNING by Richard Bradford. 256 pages. Lippincott. $4.95.

A sweet and tenderly humorous song of youth is always appealing; and when it is sung mostly in rhythm and with nearly perfect nostalgic pitch, it becomes something of a rarity.

Josh Arnold is 17, going on adulthood, and grown up everywhere but in the head. When his father volunteers for the Navy in World War II, Josh and his decaying Southern-belle mama go off to wait at the family summer place in Corazón Sagrado, a tiny town in the mountains of New Mexico. Unfortunately, Mama can't adjust to Sagrado; the people are Mexicans, Indians and Anglos, the streets are full of donkey manure, and there's scarcely anyone to play bridge with. She begins to tap the stock of sherry in the cellar and becomes a befuddled wino. Along with looking after Mama and completing the process of growing up, Josh has some special problems of his own. Change Lopez, the meanest pachuquito in town, threatens to castrate him; an assignation becomes an embarrassing flop; and he can't decide whether he loves the Episcopal rector's daughter or the gardener's. Eventually, like Huck Finn, Penrod and Holden Caulfield, all of whom he resembles, Josh painfully squirms through the gap in the hedge that separates adolescence from manhood.

Author Bradford, 36, is the son of the late Roark Bradford, whose fanciful Negro folk tales about the creation, Of Man Adam an' His Chillun, were adapted by Marc Connelly into Green Pastures. He obviously has inherited his father's ear for dialect. On his own, he has the spontaneous gait and happy tone of a natural-born—if derivative—storyteller.