Books: John Applegate, American

MAINSTREAM—Hamilton Basso—Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

In six of his seven books Hamilton Basso has written of the South. The region of his novelist's imagination is a sullen and moldering domain, full of crime, where malicious clubwomen exchange poisoned compliments in honeyed Southern accents and where somber husbands carry in their pockets rattlesnake rattles which they buzz as their speechless comment on the life of their times. In Courthouse Square, revolving around a lynching, ana in Sun in Capricorn, about the rise of a worse Huey Long, Author Basso drew as bitter a picture of his native section as Sinclair Lewis drew in...