Books: Potato People

THE WEST WIND (256 pp.)—Faith Baldwin—Holt, Rinehart & Winston ($3.95).

Their names, if they were married, were Peg and Tom, Jane and Bill, Jeremy and Jennifer. Single men were always called Brick or Brock or Bruce. Unmarried girls needed a gallant name; it was usually Helen. They lived in a smallish, unidentified city in an immemorial Indiana. The men spoke to each other in a language called kidding ("You old son of a gun"), and the women talked somberly about "our marriage'' as if marriage were a large, fragile china object one kept in the front hall. They led decent, busy lives,...