NONFICTION - Nov. 27, 1994

THE DROWNT BOY: An Ozark Tale by Art Homer (University of Missouri Press: $19.95; 155 pp.). Art Homer grew up in the Missouri Ozarks in the 1950s, son of subsistence farmers, but from an adult perspective his boyhood seemed cut from a different age, as if the Great Depression had “moved into the Ozarks, liked it, and retired there. . . .” “The Drownt Boy” is Homer’s bid to reclaim that time, as told through a three-day canoe trip he takes with his stepson, Reese, on a flooded Missouri river. It’s a lyrical evocation of a singular, outmoded way of life, somewhat marred by asides and abstractions that distract from the book’s two intertwined voyages--on occasionally dangerous water in the present, and into the equally dangerous but nostalgia-tinged memories of the past. Homer, a teacher at the University of Nebraska, writes most effectively of childhood--collecting ant-lions and chicken eggs, watching his father scythe the front yard to deter snakes; and the canoe trip likewise provides good material--river-rangers looking for a “drownt” child, car-campers deposited in treetops by high, violent water. To reach the good parts of “The Drownt Boy,” though, you must slog through some stuffy philosophical and etymological, not enty -, discourses--Homer admits to having been called “professor” as a child--which make a very short book seem too long. One hopes, for Reese’s sake, that Homer was more closed-mouthed during the canoe trip itself.