Word: rainbows
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...RAINBOW ON THE ROAD (343 pp.)-Esther Forbes - Houghton Mifflin...
...Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $150,000 novel contest. Regional devotion comes naturally to Esther Forbes, daughter of a pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts clan, one of whose 17th-century members died in jail while awaiting trial for witchcraft. There is little witchcraft, unfortunately, in Author Forbes's latest novel, Rainbow on the Road, and the plot is frugal even by Yankee standards. A solid fog of research muffles her characters, but whenever it lifts for a page or two, the sights and sounds of the New England countryside around 1830 come through in a kind of pastoral tone poem...
...figures of men and women on canvases but leaving the faces blank. When spring comes, he saddles his cart, piles in the canvases and hits up the New England towns for people who will pay $3 to $5 to have the blank spots filled in with their "likenesses." Rainbow on the Road covers one season's adventures on Jude's circuit as told in flashback by a 14-year-old boy who goes with...
...Rainbow on the Road's fatter dividends are paid in local types (traveling songsmiths, drovers, eccentrics) and local talk ("She was plump as a little pig. active as sin, awkward as a calf, and not much more legs on her than a pigeon"). Best of all are Author Forbes's evocations of New England in the four seasons. Her book ends in the late fall: "Crows were out gleaning, looking like blown bits of charred paper. And talking all the time - like crows talk. Far above, the lonely hawk floating. Harvest is over. It is the lone-somest...
...Plus 7. The field marshal, his chest arrayed in a rainbow of 38 ribbons, employs certain special equipment to aid his performance: cough drops for generals so bold as to cough while Montgomery is talking, an officer's whistle to bring order out of the babel of English, French, Italian and Turkish, and a brass schoolbell to squelch extra-loud arguments. The men before him are top SHAPE officers, brought together for one of Monty's periodic "Command Post Exercises" for skull practice in the huge, hypothetical war which SHAPE wages in the mind, in the hope that...