Books: Kansas Gothic

FOR THE TIME BEING (219 pp.)—Julia Siebel—Harcourt, Brace & World ($3.95).

Kansas-born Novelist Julia Siebel seems intent on becoming the laureate of quiet lives desperately lived. In two novels about her native state, there is an occasional wheat-crop failure, but the yield of domestic unhappiness is as invariable as debt and taxes. In The Narrow Covering (TIME, July 30, 1956), careless and malevolent death bore down on ordinary prairie folk to whom Author Siebel assigned hardly a pleasant, let alone a happy, moment. For the Time Being is relatively upbeat. No one dies....