Living With Books

...The method is unnecessarily complicated, and, in the telling of the story on two levels of time, the character of the narrator is blurred...

...and a brutal torture scene...

...It is lively stuff, and there is nothing that insults the intelligence...

...Whether his human being, after such minute dissection, can ever be put together again is a question, but we can learn something about ourselves from Mr...

...The idea is provocative enough, but Vidal hasn't the philosophical range necessary to develop it...

...Brooks's first novel, The Big Wheel, but it has a wider range, and the portraits of the Osborne clan are excellent...

...Helen Eustis did the same sort of thing in The Horizontal Man...

...The book is really what its name implies, a series of pictures, and therefore necessarily static...

...Like most of the post-Jamesians, Matthiessen has conscientiously sought for the form that will communicate to the reader the maximum of meaning, and for the sake of that form and that meaning he has sacrificed narrative interest...

...Both Race Rock and A Pride of Lions move backward and forward in time, but Mr...

...Toynbee explains, "waking in hospital, inquires about his past, and is answered by his own voices from the past: Noel, the Voice of his Innocence...

...It is...

...Gore Vidal has tried his hand at many kinds of fiction in his youthful career, and now he has attempted an anti-ulopian novel in the Huxley-Orwell tradition...

...The theme of A Pride of Lions is, in a way, a young man's coming achievement of maturity, and that is explicitly the theme of Peter Matthiessen's interesting first novel, Race Rock (Harper, S3.50...

...of course, the theme of a large proportion of first novels...

...Jarrell's wit is overwhelming, but the fact remains that the book is more fun to read than anything I have come across in a long time...

...In the first place, it permits him a variety of styles, ranging from the fierce and bawdy colloquialism of Charley's diatribes to passages of richly poetic meditation...

...Actually, the level of sophistication in Casino Royale is not particularly high...

...But there is some shrewd and amusing business about a money-raising firm, and the dialogue is excellent...

...James Bond, the hero, is knowledgeable about food, drink and women, and the author is familiar with intelligence work and gambling, but the background is of only minor importance...

...And, during these years, prizes have been awarded mediocre novels by Edna Ferber, Louis Bromfield, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Caroline Miller, Martin Flavin, John Hersey, and a good many others...

...But this is a game of which some readers—and, no doubt, some writers—tire, and so we have the thriller that is something more than fast narrative...

...If, in the thirty-five years of its existence, the committee had shown a capacity for recognizing the finest in American fiction, if it had awarded prizes to the best works of Dreiser, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway...

...I doubt whether in modern times there has been a single book, fiction or non-fiction, in which there were so many amusing sentences...

...but, at the same time, he beguiles you with lively writing and sharp-edged satire...

...Nothing would be easier than to say that The Garden to the Sea isn't a novel, but a definition that would exclude Mr...

...What gave 1984 its quality of horror was Orwell's unmistakable abhorrence of the present evils that make the evils of his vision thinkable...

...Both the woman novelist and the college seem to be identifiable, but that is not important since the book's raison d'etre lies in the brilliance with which Mr...

...Faulkner, Wolfe, Farrell, McCullers and Welty as they appeared, one might respect its judgment...

...More important, one feels no strong conviction in the book...

...they have their own rules, which are only indirectly related to everyday experience...

...In America, the leading author of sophisticated thrillers is Kenneth Fearing...

...He takes you for a fast run on a rough, blood-spattered road...

...The publishers boldly proclaim that Philip Toynbee's The Garden to the Sea (Doubleday, $3.00) is experimental...

...It is, nevertheless, a pleasure to read, and leaves no doubt that Mr...

...What Fearing gets into his thriller is a kind of comedy of manners that is highly entertaining...

...Brooks relies on a conventional kind of reminiscence, whereas Mr...

...The book portrays a woman novelist who is teaching at a progressive college, the president of the college, and some members of the faculty...

...The jacket of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (Macmillan, $2.50) quotes the London Times to the effect that the novel is "both exciting and extremely civilized," and this defines the combination of qualities many readers are looking for...

...It is the lively kind of book that is fun to read, but that does not mean it is superficial...

...And in return he gets a story—a story in which all that matters is to find out what happens next...

...Adam," Mr...

...On the other hand, we do have an intense session of baccarat, with Bond bankrupting a Communist agent...

...Simply by choosing to read a mystery or a thriller, a person commits himself in advance to that "willing suspension of disbelief" of which Coleridge spoke...

...The writing is briskly idiomatic without being mannered, and there is a good deal of first-rate dialogue...

...The Generous Heart (Harcourt...

...Although Brace, a romantic rebel with a malicious sense of humor and a broad vocabulary, is the dominating character, the other people in the book are uncommonly well portrayed...

...The situation in Race Rock is amazingly like that in Mark Schorer's recent novel, The Wars of Love: three boys and a girl growing up together in a summer resort, one of the boys being a native whereas the other two boys and the girl are the children of summer residents...

...In The Courts of Memory (Vanguard, $3.95), another excellent first novel, Frank Rooney is less deliberately artful than Mr...

...While I am on the subject of fiction, I must comment on the fact that the Pulitzer Prize committee found no novel published in 1953 worthy of an award...

...The mystery and the thriller, like the tales that are told to children, are almost pure artifice...

...And, in the second place, it gives him a way of exploring and expressing the vast complexity of a human being...

...Charley, the Voice of his Punishment...

...Randall Jarrell is careful not to call Pictures from an Exhibition (Knopf, $3.50) a novel?he describes it as "a comedy"—but, of course, it will go on the fiction shelves of the libraries...

...To the reader who wants to be carried along by a story, The Garden to the Sea would seem the ultimate absurdity, but the difficult method Toynbee has chosen has its values...

...Race Rock, however, has none of the social implications of the Scborer book, but concentrates on a purely personal drama, a drama of character...

...The only novel element in the situation he portrays is the fact that totalitarianism grows out of a religious revival that is based on the death-wish...

...Although one would have guessed that this was a form in which his exuberant imagination would operate to good effect, Messiah (Dutton, $3.50) is pretty disappointing...

...At times, perhaps...

...If the book seems a little confused, that is probably because the author has worked too hard at the job of justifying the Osbornes and their way of life...

...Neither the author nor the reader is interested in what happens to anybody in the book, and it is only to one of the less interesting, less convincing characters that anything does happen...

...Its form, as a matter of fact, is the very antithesis of narrative, for the entire book is made up of a series of dialogues, and the four persons who take part in the dialogues are all aspects of one person...

...the artifice in all the twists and double-twists is hard to take...

...The author's insights are sometimes breathtaking, and yet he always leaves the reader with a sense of mysteries within mysteries...

...This is a book that is always moving ahead, a noteworthy achievement since it covers twenty years...

...In fact, however, it is rather less of a novel than the Toynbee book—not because it is experimental in form but because there is not even an implied story...

...Sometimes, what one wants is a story, and today almost the only way to be sure of getting it is to read a mystery or a thriller...

...But, as a matter of fact, none of these novelists had been given a Pulitzer Prize until Hemingway captured one last year for The Old Man and the Sea...

...Matthiessen shifts boldly and, it sometimes seems, arbitrarily from one period to another...

...Matthiessen obviously felt, as so many novelists today feel, that a straightforward telling of the story would result, so to speak, in its not being told...

...Matthiessen but no less a craftsman...

...Everything hinges on certain subtle changes in one of the characters, and unless those changes can be made real to the reader, the book is nothing...

...Vidal, on the contrary, offers a perfunctory account of the techniques by which conformity is enforced in his anti-utopia...

...Whereas Orwell knew exactly what he was afraid of, Vidal's terror is as vague as it is theatrical...

...Jarrell writes about his characters...

...Brooks is one of the most intelligent and acutely observant of the younger novelists...

...What holds us is the skill with which the pictures are drawn...

...John Brooks's A Pride of Lions (Harper, $3.50) is a novel of manners, contrasting the rootless intellectuals of New York City with some deeply-rooted but narrow-minded members of the decaying upper class in a city suggestive of Trenton, N. J. It is less incisive than Mr...

...With such a record, how in the world did the committee have nerve enough to ignore Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March, Wright Morris's The Deep Sleep, James T. Farrell's The Face of Time, Richard Wright's The Outsider, and James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain...

...Tom, the Voice of his Fall...

...Brace, $3.00) isn't quite as good as The Big Clock...

...Rooney is concerned with the relationships within a family and particularly with the relationship between the narrator, Dick Griffin, and his sister Brace...

...Toynbee's attempt to do the trick...

...a chase...

...Toynbee's book would also exclude some of our finest works of fiction, and we had better reconcile ourselves to the fact that the novel, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes...

...Race Rock has a clear enough story, but Mr...