Lost: Another Generation

THE COURTS OF MEMORY (507 pp.)--Frank Rooney--Vanguard ($3.95).

The Courts of Memory sits its characters down at the banquet board of life, and gradually changes it into an operating table. Written by a 40-year-old short-story writer named Frank Rooney, it is among the year's best first novels--until it bogs down in psychological probings. Author Rooney's two basic themes: 1) parents v. children; 2) the lost and/or silent generation in search of a code to live by.

Bracing Brother. In 1932 the Griffins are a well-to-do Los Angeles family, so close that no member breathes except through the smothering palm of another. Father Griffin, balding and in his late 503, is not out of Clarence Day, but out of a manual on corporate management. To him, his children are irresponsible junior executives who must submit periodic balance sheets on their behavior. "What have we here?" he asks in his raised-eyebrow voice when the accounts are out of line. Mother Griffin has a large, solid body, but her brain is the stuff pillows are made of. Her life is one long strategic retreat. Two Griffin children dominate the story. Dick, the novel's narrator, is an unself-confident 16, torn between the slavish loyalty demanded by his father and the slavish devotion he feels for his older sister, Brace. At the camera distance of one generation, 19-year-old Brace is the sister of Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley--a victim of the new conformism, revolt for revolt's sake. She says profane and obscene things just to shock people, and makes the relatively naive kisses of Fitzgerald's "flaming youth" seem as remote as the Gatling gun. United against their family and the world. Dick and Brace develop a neurotic dependence on each other. But it is more frequently Dick, moving from his first shave to his first girl friend, who needs Brace. Author Rooney uses the death of a grandfather to foreclose Dick's troubled adolescence and shove all his characters eight years ahead into 1940.

Faking Something. In the '403, revolt begins to taste ashy. As Dick sees it, "below rationality and reason . . . neither Brace nor I had anything. Nothing at all.'' Eager to replace nothing with something, Brace marries an earnest, straightforward Roman Catholic boy and embraces his faith. Dick goes into his father's lumber business but increasingly embraces the bottle and "used women, women who at one time had been firmly in the possession of others ... It is like buying a used car ... If you scratch it you need not feel guilty or angry . . ." When Brace finds that her husband is a mother's boy and that her own religious conversion was only an effort "to fake something," she sheds both.

Back from World War II and faced with his and Brace's emotional bankruptcy, Dick decides that "the earth does not belong to the good, the wise or the gentle, but to the adaptable." He adapts himself to a plain Jane who wants nothing more than to give him a son and heir. But Brace has dipped too deeply into her dwindling moral capital. When a second marriage ends on the rocks, she becomes an alcoholic, finally commits suicide.

Author Rooney writes lively, intelligent dialogue, and knows well how to describe one generation pushing another over the brink of patience. But when The Courts of Memory trails Dick and Brace on their hunt for mislaid values, it becomes hard to feel sorry for characters who are already so sorry for themselves.

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