Books: Homecoming

THE WATERS OF KRONOS (176 pp.)—Conrad Richter—Knopf ($3.50).

Life and literature are not as far apart as some critics like to believe, and few books seem truer to life than those in which the author indulges his nostalgia. Writers as various as Marcel Proust, Thomas Wolfe and James Thurber separately discovered that "you can't go home again." In The Waters of Kronos, Novelist Conrad Richter adds an extra dimension to this truism. His hero grasps what countless other men have sensed: you can never really leave home. Novelist Richter has written a dozen books (The Trees, The Fields, The Town) in which...