Squire of Tatterhummock

A 50-year-old man, crippled from the waist down ("but ... spared the worst traumas of paraplegia"), is the hero-narrator of this wry and funny book. He is the seeker of many will- o'-the-wisps - women (twice-married, once- mistressed, and the father of a Huey Newton- like black revolutionary); academic cachet (his bag is the Albigensian heresy); and a Colonial Tidewater Virginia mansion called Wicheley in the wonderfully named Tatterhummock County (two mill).

The hero-narrator, sumptuously named Marshall Lewis Henderson, doesn't really achieve any of these Golconda-like goals. His women are as evanescaent as will-o'-the-wisps; his Albigensian research proves to be a hoax foistered upon him by a dubious Jesuit priestand, after forking out the two mill for Wicheley, he burns it to the ground in a symbolic purging.

For Marshall Lewis Henderson inherited a veritable fount of money. He thus was able to pay large divorce settlements, in rising increments, to his two wives; able to pay large sums of money to the priest for forged Albigensian texts; and to fork out the two mill, without a twitch, for Wicheley.

But, along with all of this, he was carrying the psychological incubus of an older, more athletic, more favored brother who committed suicide in his mid-teens. As the first two of the will-o'-the-wisps slip away from him, the burning of the third is an earnest to lift the incubus.

If this sounds a somewhat manufactured and circuitous plot, it is. But Canby handles it skillfully, weaving in and out of the past and the present with a sureness of touch that increases as the book goes along. Chronologically, it is not a continuously told narrative, and this is difficult at first, as characters are brought in without introduction or full explanation. But the method works and the difficulty falls away.

In particular, Canby is wonderfully sardonic in dealing with male prep schools, evoking a sort of Catcher in the Rye deja vu. He is witty, too, about family relationships, both from a Henderson adolescent point of view and a Henderson adult one. Witty and knowing and, in an oddly astringent way, rather moving.

There are great scenes - gentle, spinster Virginia cousins getting quietly smashed on a Thanksgiving dinner in which every morsel is laced with some form of alcohol,. topped by mince pie awash in pure corn liquor; Henderson and his mother, a classic vamp, defusing (unnecessarily) a party bent upon lynching a black accused of raping a Virginia relative; and a wonderful account of a prep school play.

Henderson says of himself: "I may be difficult, but I'm not impossible." At times, that may seem like an inaccurate thumbnail, but it's true. He is not impossible, as his tale will prove.

UNNATURAL SCENERYBy Vincent Canby '45Knopf, 1979. 274 pp. $8.95

James Farley, a frequent reviewer for thesepages, is the squire of High Court, in Cornish,New Hampshire.