Books: Two True Sounds from Dixie

THE MORNING AND THE EVENING (248 pp.)—Joan Williams—Atheneum ($4)

THE MOVIEGOER (241 pp.) — Walker Percy—Knopf ($3.95).

It is always a surprise to find a good first novel, but it never is surprising to find that it comes from the South. From Harper Lee. whose To Kill a Mockingbird won this year's Pulitzer Prize, the list runs back to writers of remarkable quality. William Styron, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter are but a few whose first fiction showed them to be in full command of talents that some novelists fail to achieve in a lifetime. How do they get that way? Is it, as Author Lee has suggested, that the South is the last refuge of eccentrics in America? Or is it that the South is the only region in America with a lingering memory of aristocracy and a true tragic sense born of defeat? "The South," as Allen Tate puts it, "has had reverses that permit her people to imagine what they might have been and only thus can people discover what they are.''

Two more first novels by Southern writers prove that, whatever the reason, the literary phenomenon continues.

Cruelty & Indifference. Joan Williams, 32, now lives in Connecticut, but she remembers her small-town Southern youth with remarkable precision. The Morning and the Evening is a carefully controlled yarn, which has as its hero the village idiot of a small Mississippi town. What seems at first like another Southern Gothic construction, with heartstrings, quickly becomes something more important. No near-helpless, mute man of 40 can arouse an emotion much stronger than pity, but the reactions of neighbors to his helplessness and his own vulnerability to cruelty can tell a great deal about man's eternal debt to his fellows.

Mute Jake suffers little from cruelty, actually: boys chase him, loafers of no great intelligence use him as the butt for broad humorous gibes. But when his older brother runs out on the family and his widowed mother dies, the small community becomes their brother's keeper. They fail him, most of them, and after their effort to shuck him off onto the insane asylum collapses, the deeper tragedy follows. Author Williams is talking about the failure of human responsibility not through vindictiveness but through indifference. She does it with sureness, for she knows her villagers and she knows even more importantly, that when a man has failed another man, he has failed himself even worse.

Despair & Humor. Walker Percy, 44, is the nephew of William Alexander Percy, who wrote Lanterns on the Levee, one of this century's most readable books about the South, and something of value clearly has rubbed off onto the younger man.

Author Percy appears, his first time out. clothed in originality, intelligence and a fierce regard for man's fate. In The Moviegoer, he writes about New Orleans and the surrounding countryside as though he had created it, but that is almost the least of his virtues. The main fact is that his theme—the despair that attacks numberless people in their inmost minds—is handled with just the right degree of seriousness and humor, of rancor and indifference.