If sheer weight of words and incidents and research were the only criteria, "Raintree Country" would be the Great American Novel that Mr. Lockridge so obviously intends it to be. Or if complexity of structure and multiplicity of symbolism were the means of indexing and ranking novels, it would stand close to the top. But something else, unfortunately, is needed.

This is Lockridge's first effort, and his six years of labor have produced a gigantic and complicated penetration into The American Myth, enmeshed in a tome which numbers 1066 pages and three explanatory charts that piece out a momentous Fourth of July in an Indiana small town in 1892.

Those twenty-four hours are only the jumping off place for a flood of reminiscence that yields fifty-two flashbacks and several of the main lines of story. John Wickliff Shawnessy, a mid-century, mid-continent teacher-idealist-poet is the protagonist, and his life seems to represent the shadowy outlines of a larger history.

This greater tale, as you might easily suppose, is the growth of America, particularly as viewed from a country in the midwest. The Civil War here marks the maturing of the man and of the country, and that is only the most generalized cross-reference between plot and history. Every major event in the hero's life occurs, symbolically enough, on a Great Day in American History--Johnny Shawnessy is married (to a girl from the South) on the day John Brown is hanged; his son is born on the first day of the War; his wife goes mad simultaneously with the Battle of Gettysburg; and so on. His boyhood friends become symbols of American types--the ruthless financier, the self-improving politician, the cynical intellectual. And more subtle symbolism continues, page after page. More and more we see Shawnessy's self-identification with the County, with the river (which flows in the form of the initials of two major characters), with the earth itself.

Somehow, though, all this is never more than partly successful. Once in a while, glimmerings of the Myth shine out, but more often the reader is too tangled up in meandering and philosophizing to grasp the insights that always seem to lie just below the surface of comprehension. Lockridge's peculiar arrangement of incidents is of little help. For some reason, he has invented an annoying little stunt of running together the last sentence of an episode in 1892 with the first few words in a flashback sequence. Perhaps this ties the two together in the reader's mind, but the device becomes irritatingly cute after the first dozen or so uses. More bothersome is his scheme of omitting a handful of climatic events of the story, and saving them for a sort of catch-all crescendo at the end.

But despite its flaws and its frequent failures, "Raintree County" is worth a few days' wading-through, if only to experience those scattered portions of the mass that crop up almost without warning to give the impression of real greatness. Lockridge displays direct inheritance from Welfe and from Joyee and from Dos Passes, but most of the time it is all Lockridge and the good earth of Raintree County.