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JONATHAN YARDLEY
THE NEW OLD SOUTHERN NOVEL
THE RIVER TO PICKLE BEACH. By Doris Betts. Harper and Row. $7.95.
THE GOSPEL SINGER. By Harry Crews. Morrow. $5.95. (out of print)
CAR. By Harry Crews. Morrow. $5.95.
STAY HUNGRY. .By Charles Gaines. Doubleday. $5.95.
A CRY OF ABSENCE. By Madison Jones. Crown. $1.25.
OUTER DARK. By Cormac McCarthy. Random House. $6.95.
THE COMPLETE STO.RIES. By Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $10.00.
LOVE IN THE RUINS. By Walker Percy. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $7.95.
A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE. By Reynolds Price. Atheneum. $4.95.
PERMANENT ERRORS. By Reynolds Price. Atheneum. $6.50.
THE COLLECTED STORIES. By Peter Taylor. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$10.00.
LOSING BATTLES. By Eudora Welty. Random House. $1.25.
THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER. By Eudora Welty. Random House. $5.95.
JOINER. By James Whitehead. Knopf. $7.95.
ETERNAL FIRE. By Calder Willingha.m. Vanguard. $6.95.
In this peaceful land, pretty birds
sing and the
woodbine
twines. Vio–
lets and forgot-me-nots bloom in
the meadow. The wind is soft as a
baby's smile, and as warm and gen–
tle as mother love. Only an occa–
sional random tornado moils the
scene and disrupts nature. True,
the summer sun is a fiery furnace;
it boils the blood, cooks the brain,
and spreads a fever in the bones.
But that same fearful orb,
in
col–
laboration with the sweet rain gen–
erated by its power, makes the lit–
tle flowers grow. - CALDER WIL–
LINGHAM,
Eternal Fire
The point was not widely remarked upon in 1962, when
Eternal Fire
appeared, but with that paragraph and the more than
six hundred sprawling pages that followed, Calder Willingham marked
a turning point in .the fiction of the American Sooth. That may seem
