Books: Photograph of a Youth

WALK LIKE A MORTAL—Don Wickenden—Morrow ($2.50).

Walk Like a Mortal is the story of ten quietly crucial months, some year in the '20s, in the life of 17-year-old Gabe Mackenzie. It gains no little through a fact sparsely precedented in U. S. fictional adolescence : that its hero is neither a Harold Teen, a neuraesthete, nor a tragicomic boob, but merely an intelligent, quite normal high school student.

At the start, solid citizen though he is, Gabe is more seriously captured in his mother's love than he realizes. At the finish, with his graduation...