THE CHRISTENING PARTY.

By FrancisSteegmuller '27. New York: Farrar, Strausand Cudahy, 1960. 213 pp. $3.75.

Like Robert Frost, Francis Steegmuller spent only a year at Dartmouth. Like Frost he is still an alumnus very much worth claiming. He has been a steady contributor to The New Yorker for many years; he has had the pleasure during his own lifetime of seeing his Flaubert and Madame Bovary hailed as a classic; he has been as successful as novelist and short story writer as he has been as scholar. He even writes poetry.

The Christening Party is Mr. Steegmuller's seventh novel and seventeenth book. The locale if not the time will be familiar to many Dartmouth graduates. The book is laid in "Waverly," Connecticut, a budding exurb near Stamford which seems to occupy the same ground as Greenwich. The year is 1906.

Of characters there are so many it is hard to keep them all in mind, much less their relationships. There's Bishop Dugan of the Catholic diocese of Connecticut and his brother the Judge (of Waverly probate court). There is that one of Judgy's three daughters who escaped a convent, and her husband, a man with low relations in Stamford. There are sisters, brothers, cousins, and aunts beyond the numbering, nearly all of them vividly drawn. There's even a visiting Englishman, the Hon. Noel Kitcat, whose interest in archeology is exceeded only by his density when it comes to understanding Americans.

All of these characters - together with some of the original Waverly Protestants - are drawn together for the christening of Judgy's second grandchild and first granddaughter. On the surface the events of the day are slow - suffused with that kind of nostalgia which seems almost inevitable when 1961 considers 1906. But leisurely and even slight though the novel is, a great deal actually happens that day, including what amounts to a murder. The Honorable Noel, in the funniest scene of the book, goes to dig up an Indian mound. Judgy finally gets a decent probate fee, after many fee-hungry years. Margery, the youngest and prettiest aunt, gets the promise of a husband, on condition she give up living in sin. The seven-year-old narrator gets as much new information as a boy can handle in one day. And Dr. Oscar Hornbeck gets an extraordinary death.

This is a book as wistful as a daguerreotype. And while not Mr. Steegmuller's best, it is a charming one.