THE HIDDEN FLOWER (307 pp.)Pearl BuckJohn Day ($3.50).
WINDOM'S WAY (286 pp.) James Ramsey UllmanLippincott ($3).
"If the critic mounts the soapbox," wrote Poet John Peale Bishop, "the garbage remains in the streets." He might just as well have been talking about soapbox novelists.
In the past 25 years, hundreds of hortatory novels have appeared, preaching everything from Communism to yoga; with story generally sacrificed to sentiments, few of them survived the intellectual storms that blew them up. Last week brought two more.
Pearl Buck's latest, The Hidden Flower, preaches racial tolerance. Allen Kennedy...
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