DATE: Wednesday, April 23, 1997             TAG: 9704240666

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E6   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY LAURIE A. LUEBBERT 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

TURNING BACK TIME IS INTERESTING PLOT TWIST

THE MERE mention of the term ``midlife crisis'' causes some to cringe.

But not John Ashe. A 50-year-old lawyer with a wife and grown son could never fall into the trap of something so intangible.

John is perfectly content to stumble out of bed, go for an easy run - he still insists on running despite swollen Achilles' tendons - and listen to his wife berate him while she feeds him ``colon bran,'' another telltale sign of age taking its toll.

But when Elena Conifer, a young paralegal, steps into his life, John starts his journey back in time.

And that sets the stage for Greg Williams, a University of Virginia graduate, to explore in his first novel, ``Younger Than Springtime,'' a phenomenon he calls ``youthing.''

Youthing takes the midlife crisis one step further.

Instead of just yearning for the past, John begins to undergo some noticeable transformations.

Oh, sure, he buys a Porsche, always a sign that something is happening to an otherwise stable, suburban lawyer. But when he wakes up in the morning and the pain in his Achilles' tendons has dissipated, John is ready to take on the world, even the New York marathon.

As John and Elena's relationship improves, so, too, does his running and his appearance.

The drawback to this newfound invigoration, however, is that as John regains his youth, his attitude and maturity also regress.

And thus, Williams has established the plot's conflict. Here's a classic May-September romance that goes awry because Elena, in falling into John's life, was seeking a man with a solid career who was settled down and didn't put sexual prowess above all else. As he changes, so does her opinion of him.

Although the book's tone is not cynical, it's tough to walk away from ``Younger Than Springtime'' without a sense of foreboding about the future of American society. Williams' portrait of society is one in which all marriages are built on shaky foundations and the viability of heterosexual relationships is questioned by those who have been married.

Williams does a wonderful job with character development. From personality quirks to solid physical descriptions, most of the major players come to life.

He also transports the reader from the hustle-and-bustle life of New York City to the dangerous streets of Atlanta's less-than-desireable gang-infested turf to the mountain air of Boulder, Colo., without a hitch.

Williams tackles an interesting concept, though he stretches it at points. Some of the new John Ashe's achievements are too much to bear. There just aren't that many runners - even those in their prime, much less 50-somethings - who can keep pace with the runners from Kenya.

And, though there's little gratuitous sex, Williams peppers his novel with some frank talk about sexually related issues, including potency and homosexuality.

Williams only subtlely foreshadows the true ending of the story, so the reader cannot hold him responsible for its predictability. But he makes a lame attempt to cover that mistake by taking the book a little further than he has to, a ploy that also sets up a potential follow-up novel about John and the possibility of another chance at youthing. MEMO: Laurie A. Luebbert is a staff copy editor. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Younger Than Springtime''

Author: Greg Williams

Publisher: Donald I. Fine.

297 pp.

Price: $22.95

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