CEREMONY IN LONE TREE, by Wright Morris (304 pp.; Atheneum; $4), is set in the barren Nebraska plains country, where the author stalks his favorite game the "Sears Roebuck Gothic" Midwesterners with souls imprisoned like "buzzing flies" in "God's cocoon." Morris has been compared variously to Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, even Mickey Spillane, but in this, his 13th book, he sounds more like a kind of slick-paper Nathanael West, without that gifted writer's savage humor. His story is wired to the tangled nerve ends of the collection of oddballs and misfits who...
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