For his seventh novel in fourteen years Dr. Cronin offers us "The Green Years," a slice of Scotch-Irish autobiography that teems with quiet charm and the special brand of heartache that this painstaking author is so adept at fashioning. The fact that the movies have already paid a record price for the rights should surprise no one: like "The Citadel," which won the critics' prize for that year, and "The Keys of the Kingdom," which is yet to be released, it offers a ready-made scenario for the trials, and the ultimate triumph, of a starved but valiant youth, Dr. Cronin's meticulous hand (which made "The Citadel" a kind of super-blueprint of every young doctor) has taken his own boyhood and made of it a mirror in which we may see reflected the frustrations of youth. Here, once again, is the loneliness and the blind ecstasy of adolescence—and...