The Hungry Generation

A moody, distraught Scottish laird and his wife, a leftist hippie from Brooklyn, are as unhappy a couple as they are unlikely in this powerful novel laced with lilting prose and the wild beauty of the Scottish countryside. Hugh Gordon, who inherits his family's ramshackle estate from his eccentric scholar father, is too idealistic and too haunted by childhood demons to run things effectively. His wife Ellen, a doctrinaire Marxist, is unmasked as smug and self-righteous when Hugh confronts her with the discovery that his presumed son is actually the product of her casual liaison with a Portuguese communist. Hugh's own love affair with his cousin Clarissa runs into trouble when her jealous husband, his best friend, goes on a drunken rampage. Though Ellen spouts political rhetoric, Hugh is more politically perceptive as he rails at a ``complacent and useless'' gentry, ``middle-class youths playing at revolution'' and the shortcomings of both capitalism and communism. Gilmour, a historian and biographer of Lampedusa, has crafted a digressive story rich in symbolism. (Sept.)