Books: Ministers' Children

HEAVY LADEN—Philip Wylie—Knopf ($2.50). The Rev. Hugh McGreggor, lion of the Lord, cleaned up a saloon-ridden Ohio town, survived two flesh-and-blood wives and one great War, and reaped as reward a luxurious country-club parish in the "Gilt-edged suburb of America." His pulpit thunderings were consistently concerned with Faith, and helped considerably to deaden his own still small voice of doubt. But Ann, his modernist daughter, suspected him of puritanical hypocrisy, and flung herself the more violently into a materialistic existence that was promiscuous, not to say debauched. McGreggor, sensual himself, imagined her life as accurately as it is possible for a...