In the apt phrase of the publisher, this Southern novel ["Spencer's Mountain"] is a "happy" one. Advance-reader Harper Lee colloquially called it "splendid," and Jesse Stuart spoke of the sheer beauty of its simple writing…. In short, the book shows every promise of realizing at least a brief sojourn on the cenotablets of best-sellerdom. Or, to put it another way, with his second novel Mr. Hamner has become unmistakably the full-fledged William Makepeace Thackeray of Nelson County, Virginia…. [Mr. Hamner] remembers the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood with clarity. He reports them sometimes with brilliance and always with affection. His plot is simplicity itself: Country boy grows up, meets city girl, runs up against Latin syntax, sinks same.

Two things about the work (besides its obviously wide appeal to the vast public of happy-novel readers) call for comment. One is the messing around with symbols. There...