Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Three Novels on Connecticut Living, Juvenile Murder, Menhaden Fishing I HAVE BEEN reading three novels that I didn't get a chance to read when they were...
...The theme of the novel—the difficulties of a young couple who want to adopt a child—provides opportunity for the kind of comic scene DeVries knows how to write...
...Rhoda is what she is, and there can be no development of her character...
...In particular, Mr...
...It is through Leroy that we get our clearest and most terrifying insight into Rhoda, and the conflict between them gives the book some of its most chilling moments...
...Like Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, it is full of witty lines, but it is also funny in a way that the Jarrell book isn't...
...Here there is drama enough, and it reaches a terrible and ironic climax...
...Conrad is impressed by the economic importance of the menhaden—variously called porgy, pogy, bone-fish and shad—and he tells of the many uses to which the oil extracted from it is put...
...I cannot, of course, vouch for his accuracy, but the style feels right and the prose is a pleasure to read...
...Since the mate is the only fully developed character in the book, and since Mr...
...The narrator is the mate, a man in his late fifties, veteran of many years of menhadening...
...March focused attention, therefore, on Rhoda's mother: first on her growing realization of the child's iniquity and then on her discovery that she is herself the daughter of a cold-blooded murderer...
...Although his reputation never quite solidified, he was always being "discovered" as an important writer...
...William March died last May, not long after the appearance of The Bad Seed (Rinehart, $3.00), which proved to be both a critical and a popular success...
...I have to admit that many of the stories the magazine publishes aren't typical New Yorker fiction, either...
...What matters is that Mrs...
...There are two days of hard luck, and then on the third day the ship makes a good haul...
...Then a sudden storm comes up, and that is the end of the Moona Waa Togue...
...March apparently believed, does not seem wholly plausible to me, but that is not important...
...In the long run, however, such a distinction becomes unimportant, for the reporting is so imaginative as to lift the book into the realm of creative literature, whether one calls it a novel or not...
...all of them Negroes except the captain...
...Conrad's style is a triumph...
...The ship is in such bad shape that the men balk at another voyage, but they give in when the owner makes emergency repairs...
...In the background of the story March placed a variety of characters, all of them plausible, some of them amusing, and each of them vital in the unfolding of Rhoda's and Mrs...
...Reginald Tasker, an authority on murder...
...Most striking of all is Leroy, the surly janitor, who understands Rhoda because, up to a point, he resembles her...
...DeVries is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, and the people of his novel are the kind of people who are often found in the pages of that magazine...
...Conrad works so hard to give us a comprehensive account of menhaden fishing, one sometimes has a feeling that this is a piece of reporting rather than a novel...
...But his last novel, happily, was one of his best...
...it is also free from the kind of self-laceration so commonly found in New Yorker stories...
...In 1952, after a silence of nearly a decade, he published October Island, which was rather disappointing...
...That is the final turn of the screw, and March knew how to make the most of it...
...DeVries makes fun of his characters and, by implication, of himself, but he really makes fun...
...That Rhoda could have inherited her peculiar criminal tendencies, as Mr...
...They are semi-intellectuals who live in Connecticut, do a considerable amount of drinking and a vast amount of talking, and get themselves into a variety of messes...
...But chiefly he is concerned with the twenty-odd men on board the Moona Waa Togue...
...We see and hear them as they go about the complicated tasks that constitute their job, as they while away their idle moments, and as they face the perils of the sea...
...The depiction of the child is magnificent, but, as March well knew, she is not only too abnormal and too hateful but also too static to serve as the center of dramatic interest...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Three Novels on Connecticut Living, Juvenile Murder, Menhaden Fishing I HAVE BEEN reading three novels that I didn't get a chance to read when they were published last spring...
...Long experience and constant reflection on life, man and the sea make him a tolerant and perceptive interpreter...
...The Bad Seed is a grim story about a nine-year-old girl who will commit murder to get what she wants...
...Without bothering with idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, he seeks to reproduce the rhythms and the poetic phraseology of the speech of his people...
...The book is not only free from the arrogance that mars Jarrell's book...
...Peter DeVries's The Tunnel of Love (Little, Brown, $3.50) is an uncommonly diverting novel...
...Penmark's experiences: the genteel and eccentric Misses Fern, who keep a school...
...The captain decides to anchor overnight, and the next day the ship returns to port with all the menhaden it can carry and more than it should...
...They have nothing in common except merit, but that is great enough to justify this belated comment...
...flighty Monica Breedlove, with her Freudian patter...
...I don't mean to disparage Pictures from an Institution, for which, as a tour de force, I have great admiration, but I got more pleasure from reading The Tunnel of Love, which made me laugh instead of merely making me admire the cleverness of the author...
...But somehow it doesn't seem to be typical New Yorker fiction...
...Earl Conrad's Gulf Stream North (Doubleday, $3.50) describes five days in the lives of the officers and crew of the Moona Waa Togue, an ancient ship engaged in fishing for menhaden off the South Atlantic coast...
...Moreover, he has endowed his narrator not only with wit but also with a fair share of human foibles, and has thus kept the book free from the rather dreadful self-righteousness that clings to Jarrell's novel...
...Penmark is convinced that she carried the bad seed...
...The publication of Company K in 1933 made it clear that March was a writer to be taken seriously, and in such novels as Come In at the Door and The Looking Glass, as well as in dozens of short stories, he gave evidence of remarkable talent...
...there is no savageness in his humor...
Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 36
