Stillwater: A Novel.

• Author: Hart, Gary
• Position: Critical Mass.

STILLWATER: A Novel by William F. Weld Simon & Schuster, $23.00

WILLIAM WELD, FORMER GOVernor of Massachusetts, has written his third novel, a pastoral-romantic-political fiction that does much to disprove the notion that politicians are good only at serving special interests and furthering their own careers.

Set in the Swift River valley of western Massachusetts in the late Depression years, Stillwater describes, through the eyes of its 15-year-old narrator, Jamieson Kooby, the impact on the valley of the perfidious schemes of "the Boston boys," the state's power structure, to inundate five towns by damming the Swift River. Along the way Jamieson is party to a series of Huck-and-Tom adventures with his best friend Caleb and falls in love with Hannah Corkey, whose clairvoyance flows from numerous previous lives including, inter alia, that of a Salem witch burned in 1692 and a number of years spent as an 18th-century Indian captive.

Much of the book is an episodic fabric of interwoven themes: the contest between the guilelessness of nature and the exigencies of "progress"; the integrity of village life versus the villainy of urban power politics; the rigid morality of orthodox religion (represented by Preacher Moncrieff) set against the humanism of Jamieson's warm-hearted, salty, Nietzsche-reading Grandma Hardiman (whose credo is "worldly pleasure is sacred"); and the virtue of those like the hobo Hammy contrasted with the unscrupulous Curley and his local henchman, Lawyer Kincaid.

Within this tapestry are woven scenes of druid ceremonies in Thayer's Wood in the middle of Midsummer night, the lingering revolutionary spirit of Captain Daniel Shays, hero of the Revolution and leader of the first rebellion against the post-Revolutionary order, the skullduggery concealed behind the scarlet curtains of Miss Millie Tiverton's fancy house, and more ghosts, spirits, and skeletons than you could find in a corrupt politician's closet.

As Governor Curley's army of "Woodpeckers"--advance men for bulldozers, hydraulic engineers, and dam builders--invades the...