One Day

One Day by Wright Morris. Atheneum Publishers, $5.95.

One day in November, after a brief, chaotic career as a civil-rights demonstrator, a young rebel returns to Escondido, California, to deposit her fatherless child, as a kind of off-color protest against the world, in the lost animal chute at the Dog Pound. Both conceived in a spirit of ultimate protest, the child and the horrifying gesture are absorbed into surfaces far more resistant to shock than the girl had dreamed. Even the news of Kennedy’s assassination, which in its meaningless horror dwarfs her tiny effort to shock the town into consciousness, is gradually assimilated, reduced to cliché: “How you like that, kid?” “What will they think of next, eh?”