Books: Main Street Mame

THE ARISTOCRAT by Conrad Richter. 180 pages. Knopf. $4.50.

Now that he is mellow, fulfilled and nearing 80, Conrad Richter is devoting his fiction more and more to recollections of the kind hearts and sometimes genteel people who lived in the town where he grew up, Pine Grove, Pa. (pop. 2,267). He has written three books about the mores of "Unionville, Pa.," Pine Grove's fictional counterpart, and they are, for the most part, splendidly solid. His latest, alas, is not. The Aristocrat is slender and seemingly self-indulgent. It would be slick as well, were it not for Richter's imperturbable sincerity. He presents a caricature of an indomitable spinster straight from Southern romance as if she were a discovery, and his very own.

"Miss Alexandria" is, quite naturally, the last of the Morleys, a family that has more or less owned Unionville for generations. With her "thin, regal nose" and her whim of iron, she is a durable devotee of doing things right. "I was brought up to be polite," she says complacently, "even if it killed you." Living in a world of Satsuma bowls and family portraits, she nonetheless bravely jousts with the local mineowners, predictably besting them all. Through a shrewd financial maneuver, she forces them to pay their delinquent school taxes. Conveniently deaf, socially deft and totally domineering, she admits to only one slight fear—of hospitals. But she rises to any occasion, especially if it turns out to be a family funeral.

Perhaps it is churlish to make fun of Miss Alexandria. Certainly the author would never do so. He observes that the virtues of such women, products of pre-tax wealth and protracted social training, are unlikely to survive the times. Fondly, he seeks to preserve their manners and their memory. If Miss Alexandria seems not entirely real except to his eye, what matter? Affection, especially in much of modern literature, is a rare commodity. Like the loyalty of a husband to an unattractive wife, Richter's affection for this Main Street Auntie Mame ends up being somewhat touching.