FICTION

THE PULL OF THE EARTH by Alfred Alcorn (Houghton Mifflin: $15.95). It is the summer of 1957 on a debt-ridden dairy farm in Massachusetts. Sexually repressed and not growing any younger, Janet Vaughn has married not only a farmer--her ailing, much older Hedley--but an impoverished farm. She wants neither; she wants a child Hedley is too sick to sire. Enter the inevitable third man. A decorated Marine veteran of World War II, Lucien Quirk has become a cynical, ribald drunk drifting from farm to farm. This will be his last hay harvest. When Hedley is hospitalized after his second heart attack, Janet can no longer resist Quirk’s virile yet surprisingly tender advances. For the man, lust is transformed into a small miracle of love, the redemption that Janet Vaughn embodies. For the woman, sexual awakening blossoms into what she believed she wanted most--pregnancy--but by the wrong man. It is the 1950s, and she is Catholic and married; but worst of all, she does not love this hired man. A tragedy is brewing, and first-time novelist Alcorn wheels us to the jarring climax with tenderness, sorrow and richly metaphorical prose, redeeming the cliche of his story’s dramatic circumstances.