Those Who Blink

The setting is the Louisiana-Mississippi border country. Korean War veteran Farley Stokes works at a deadening job in a Baton Rouge chemical plant. But the land still exerts a powerful pull, and during a plant strike he returns to his grandfather's farm. Bo Simmons, a union organizer and Farley's mentor, arranges a loan so that Farley can buy cattle. By degrees Farley is enveloped in the encroaching shadows cast by Bo's sinister connections in the North. Bo is killed; emissaries of the mob appear menacingly on the scene; the woman Farley lives with proves not quite faithful. Nothing abides, Farley least of all: he is really not very interesting, and neither are the other characters nor the situation in which they find themselves. The author has a gift for language, but the themes he works here bear the weary air of having long been exhausted. (March 31)