Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS Novels by Steinbeck and Shirer And One from South Africa By Granville Hicks William L. Shirer, in Stranger Come Home (Little, Brown, $3.95), has written about a foreign...
...Although the book contains the customary disclaimer about coincidental resemblances, most of the characters are recognizable, and particularly the villain of the piece, Senator O'Brien...
...It turns next to the second son, Laurie, who works in a pharmacy, dreams of becoming a writer, and worries about his mistress...
...Shirer's indignation, I can only say that the book left me pretty much where it found me...
...As an attack on Senator McCarthy, Red Channels, and the cowardly behavior of certain high-placed radio executives and magazine editors, the book is effective enough...
...Albert Segal's Johannesburg Friday (McGraw-Hill, $3.75) is a novel about a Jewish family in South Africa...
...As one who shares Mr...
...The more serious he is...
...And as journalism it is likely to convince only those whose convictions have already taken shape...
...The conflict of races never plays a central part in the story, but it is always felt, and this gives irony and poignance to Mr...
...The question that has to be raised is what value this kind of fictionalized journalism has...
...Segal is an uneconomical writer and sometimes an awkward one, but he does make us feel the reality of the four Leventhals—two other sons play minor roles —and he gives us a strong sense of the Leventhal family as an entity...
...The canneries have gone, but the Palace Flophouse is still in existence, and Doc is back at Western Biological Laboratories...
...In his portrayal of bums and prostitutes, Steinbeck is as shamelessly sentimental as he was in Cannery Row, but there are many amusing scenes...
...After Mr...
...In the background are the tense racial problems of South Africa, but these are of little concern to the Leventhals...
...The Friday of the title is the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Max and Sophie Leventhal, although the significance of the dale is remembered only by Sophie...
...Shirer has caught the atmosphere of an actual hearing, and his Senators are no better and no worse than the real article...
...That is really what the novel is about—the way the family holds together in spite of the centrifugal forces that are always tugging at its members...
...The progress of the story, however, is frequently interrupted by more or less irrelevant but usually lively sketches and anecdotes...
...The things that happen in it either have happened or might happen...
...Shirer's indignation and Mr...
...In East of Eden, Steinbeck wrote a serious novel and one that was in part excruciatingly bad...
...The third section describes Max Leventhal in his bookstore, a rather ineffectual man, comforted and sustained by his religion...
...As fiction, Stranger Come Home is not particularly impressive: Its people live only because we can associate them with figures in the news...
...the clearer his limitations become, and it is only in such an irresponsible farce as Street Thursday that he seems able to do what he wants to do...
...It does, however, raise some perplexing questions about John Steinbeck...
...He exhibits here, as he has exhibited again and again in the past twenty-five years, many of the talents of a first-rate novelist, and yet it has been a long time since he wrote anything that could be called a first-rate novel...
...Segal's solemnity, the high spirits of John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday (Viking, $3.50) are something of a relief, and it is also a relief to be reading a writer who is so obviously a professional...
...Segal's domestic drama...
...And finally there is the daughter, Jessie, who is in love with a Gentile and on this day forces herself to break with him...
...Shirer has produced a tract for the times, and he does not leave the reader in doubt regarding his targets...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS Novels by Steinbeck and Shirer And One from South Africa By Granville Hicks William L. Shirer, in Stranger Come Home (Little, Brown, $3.95), has written about a foreign correspondent for a radio network who returns to the United States to find himself charged before a Senate committee with being a Communist and a Soviet spy...
...Sweet Thursday, a sequel to Cannery Row, describes the Row after the war...
...By comparison, this extravaganza is a joy...
...The most provocative section of the novel, that which describes the hero's prolonged hearing before the O'Brien Committee, exhibits no grosser unfairnesses than we can read about in any day's newspapers...
...The book begins with Sophie's domestic activities and her thoughts about her husband and their four children...
...The book tells how Doc grew despondent and how Mack and the boys tried to find a remedy, how a girl named Suzy came to work at the Bear Flag, and how she and Doc finally got together...
...If Sophie can have her home, if Max can have his religion, if Laurie can have his career and his girl, if Jessie can avoid entanglements with a Gentile, it does not matter what happens to the millions of Africans and Coloreds...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 25
