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Moss on the North Side (Houghton Mifflin) by Sylvia Wilkinson, 26, a green-eyed elf from the tobacco country of North Carolina, is a lyric evocation of childhood by one of the most talented Southern bellettrists to appear since Carson McCullers. Begun when the author was 13 and rewritten intermittently for more than a decade, Moss transpires in the mind and immediate vicinity of a white-trash waif. The girl's mother, a cold-eyed prostitute, abandons her, and her father, a warm-hearted Cherokee Indian, dies of rabbit fever. Desperate, she seeks in nature the tenderness she needs, and imagines the lost meaning of her life in bizarre epiphanies: a glimpse of flowers growing in a dead mule, an encounter with an albino Negro boy who "ain't got biddie brains in his head."
In the variegated nosegay of American letters, the Deep South's poetry of decadence stinks like a long-since-wilted magnolia, but Author Wilkinson magically refreshes its fragrance with images new as dew: "A green snake weaved around the rocks, rolling like a liquid in hot glass until the grass pulled it in and it disappeared." Language like that explains why the late Randall Jarrell described Miss Wilkinson as "the most talented writer of prose I ever taught."
The Secret of Santo Vittoria (Simon & Schuster) by Robert Crichton, 41, a World War II combat veteran, is very likely the funniest war novel since Mister Roberts. The Troy of his hilarious Iliad is a wine-producing village in southern Italy, a town so poor in everything, including fertilizer, that its inhabitants stalk oxen with a broom and a pan. The Hector of the tale is the village mayor, a paisano whose native cunning has been reinforced by the study of Machiavelli. The Agamemnon of the story is a German captain assigned to rob the village of its only precious possession: 1,320,000 bottles of vermouth.
Kesselring himself could hardly have prevailed against a populace so shifty that when a man quarrels with his neighbor he adds injury to insult by letting his donkey eat the neighbor's grass. In the belly-busting climax of this humoric epic, the Germans ignominiously wrest defeat from the jaws of victory, and the villagers preserve their vino for the postwar American market. Crichton tells his story with grace, pace, warmth and a wonderful free-reeling wit that skips among the vineyards like an inebriated billygoat. The book should make a dandy movie.