Books: Also Current: Jan. 19, 1962

THE PRIME OF Miss JEAN BRODIE, by Muriel Spark (187 pp.; Llppincott; $3.95). Knowledgeable readers of Muriel Spark's novels admire such crystalline structures of malice as Memento Mori and The Ballad oj Peckham Rye partly for the economy with which they are built. Avoiding bravura writing as she would a vulgar display of pound notes, this Scotswoman sits composedly among her characters, goading them by silence and an infrequent equivocal smile to disclose their sins. Rarely does the exposure require more than 200 pages, and at the end of a Muriel Spark novel, most readers find themselves wondering why other writers must babble on and on to twice that length.

Unhappily, in the present novel the author's spare style seems to be the product less of economy than of penury. The book consists of reminiscences by several former Edinburgh schoolgirls about an eccentric teacher who was the guru of their set. One of the girls betrayed the teacher, Miss Brodie, to a disapproving headmistress, and the story quietly explains the manner of the betrayal. The trouble with the novel is not that its subject is unpromising; Author Spark's fans are confident of her ability to discover astonishing falsities in unlikely places. The language stings as elegantly as ever, and when the author writes that gaunt Scottish schoolmistresses say good morning "with predestination in their smiles," nothing need be added to the description. The flaw is a thinness of texture; no single outline is untrue, but details are indefinite, as in a photographic positive taken too soon from the developer.

LOVE AND BE SILENT, by Curfis Harnock (246 pp.; Harcourt, Brace & World; $4.50). Strangers may think that Kaleburg, Iowa, is just a "Siberian collection of buildings," but to Farmer Robert Schneider it means pie and coffee at the Kaleburg Kafé, dances at the Cornflower Ballroom, high old times in Buzzy Burns's tavern, with its row of convenient cabins out back. His wife Donna is both high-spirited and indecisive, but he settles her down with a tumbling succession of babies. His spinster sister Alma proves more difficult. She falls in love with soft-spoken Roger Larkin, a feckless Southerner who holds the depressed view that the U.S. is a giant pool table and he its eight ball: the Great Pool Player Upstairs puts him now in the side pocket of Louisiana, now in the corner pocket of Texas. While he wanders, Alma sits patiently home, waiting.

This second novel of Author Curtis (The Work of an Ancient Hand) Harnack, 34, is ostensibly a study of the diverse marriages of Schneider and Alma, the sacred v. the profane. But what ultimately emerges is a tremulous song in praise of the Midwest, a region that has long needed a minnesinger. Harnack touches expertly on the deep small-town need to believe in such absurdities as 1) that little Joanie Henkman is the world's best cornet player, 2) that Ida Bean's goiter baffles the greatest brains in medicine, and 3) that if only Blacky Neuzig had been given his "big chance," he could have played major league ball. Iowa-born Author Harnack is married to Novelist Hortense Calisher and teaches English at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., a good thousand miles from the lowa he celebrates so well and warmly.