Books: Acres and Pains

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GARDEN STATE by JULIAN MOYNAHAN 282 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

In his mid-40s, Howard Butler has acquired the anti-hero's stock repertory of problems: dissolving marriage, dead-end advertising job in New York, rebellious teen-age daughter, losing bouts with the bottle. So he deserts his wife and exurban New Jersey home to run a tree nursery on a nearby ten acres.

Enter Watchung Pharmaceutical, an expanding drug firm that lusts after Howard's turf as well as 250 acres of prime undeveloped land adjoining it. A tiny zoning change will make the property—a potential community park—eligible for commercial development, and Watchung has the town's most influential councilman in its pocket. Corporate triumph seems inevitable—until Howard Butler discovers that his outcast condition enables him to risk the heroic.

Julian Moynahan, who lives near Princeton and teaches English at Rutgers, knows his ground. Out of such unpromising material as New Jersey zoning laws and state statutes, he has fashioned a whimsical specimen of an up-and-coming subgenre: the eco-novel. The wealthy residents—Howard's ex-neighbors—want nothing to despoil the green splendor of their homes and three-acre lots. Less favored citizens want Watchung—because it will help to pay property taxes.

But the resolution sneaks between the dilemma's horns. Howard foils Watchung's design singlehanded by accepting one bribe, passing on another, then telling all at the climactic town meeting. The spectacle of elected officials and corporate legal lizards cowering in ashen fear before a public recitation of their misdeeds seems sadly old-fashioned in this summer of '73. Plucky loners rarely stop corporations dead in their tracks, as Moynahan knows; the Watchung caper is a fictionally spiced version of several successful corporate moves into Princeton and environs in recent years. The novel's dedication ("To the Millstone River Valley and to the memory of lost green fields") marks it as a valedictory, but the plot refuses to say goodbye. In the course of telling the way it was, Moynahan veers wishfully into the way he thinks it should have been—an entertaining rejoinder thought up after the debate has ended.