Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Some Good Fiction Which Won't Get The Popular Attention It Deserves In the publishing business, as everyone knows, a few novels get a good deal of attention...
...Some of them, perhaps, are too subtle and too complicated...
...The remainder of the novel shows what these tensions, heightened by certain external pressures, do to—and for—the various members of the family...
...Swados isn't, but he rarely lapses into the kind of vagueness that some short-story writers mistake for subtlety...
...for instance, the story of the man who wants to be a singer and is injured in the throat: there is the story of the man who idolizes his sun and buys h;m the car in which he kills himself...
...Yellen is subtle, in a way that Mr...
...There was, first, her romantic passion for Robert Alston, which led to a romantic marriage and a painful separation and divorce...
...This is not a pattern that makes for subtlety, and some of the situations Mr...
...Summers's insight into his heroine: in the opinion of one male reader he is a perceptive man as well as a daring one...
...Swados's first novel, Out Went the Candle...
...Collections of short stories, unless they are by authors with magic names, are even more likely to be overlooked than novels, and in reviewing three such collections I want to pay tribute to their publishers...
...Curley doesn't invariably hit this point, he always tries, and his successes are more frequent than his failures...
...Although there are some fine little episodes from the nameless narrator s girlhood in a Methodist parsonage, she is chiefly concerned with the men in her life...
...and they are skilful and subtle and rather more complicated than Mr...
...He makes us see that in all her roles— the devoted wife, the dutiful wife, the abandoned mistress—she was always the same woman, and the climax of the novel comes when she achieves a fuller realization than ever before of what kind of woman she is...
...Once in a while, the object of attention is a good novel such as James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed, which is extraordinarily good even though it isn't the towering masterpiece some reviewers have called it, and we are bound to rejoice: but then we think of all the other novels that are being neglected and that don't deserve to be...
...I also like the irony of "Back in the Saddle Again," the story of a man of 56 who returns to the factory from which he had escaped into a small business 20 years earlier...
...Swados's detestation of the assembly lino, there is only one, "Joe...
...Swados has, as the reader would soon realize even if the jacket didn't tell him, and the book constantly testifies to the impact of the assembly line on his senses and his emotions...
...Joe says...
...Stoneville Pike," which is in the same vein, is not quite so convincing, but the adroitness of the story, except for the ending, is impressive...
...3.75...
...The stories in the volume mostly portray middle-aged men and women, often as they look back on their youth, and Mr...
...3.50) has boldly invaded the mind of a woman...
...hale the work, hale the shoddy product Ihey turn out...
...Samuel Yellen's short stories have been appearing in magazines, mostly the quarterlies, for a long time, but The Passionate Shepherd (Knopf, $3.50) is the first collection of his work...
...The novel begins on an island off the coast of Maine, which has been for many years the summer home of the Wyeths, and the first part is a study in centripetal and centrifugal forces...
...As her recollections catch up with the present, that February in Mexico City, she is coming to terms with the past and trying to make it serve the future...
...She is a woman of 40, temporarily immobilized by an injury received in an automobile accident, who sits in an apartment in Mexico City during the dreary month of February, and puts down her thoughts on life and especially love...
...It is the story of a Cambridge (Massachusetts) family, people comfortably well off...
...with cultivated minds and independent spirits...
...It was this affair, as we have known from the first, that brought her to Mexico, and, by the time she is ready to talk about it, we realize that it has run its course...
...Whatever else may be true, this is realism in the basic meaning of that term, resting solidly on observed fact and felt experience...
...Swados portrays seem unfortunately familiar...
...But the sense of the family, this strange and precarious union of diverse and conflicting entities, is wonderfully given...
...If Miss Sarton has hesitated in this instance to take us inside a man's mind...
...Without denying the clement of truth in this indictment...
...Summers's art suggests her artlessness and at the same time, through her casual and fragmentary reminiscing, reveals her character and tells her story...
...I feel sorry for the people who are going In be victimized by bally hoo...
...We see how much all the Wyeths—there are three generations of them on the island—have in common, and at the same time we feel the ominous tensions between Sprig and his wife and between Sprig and his son and daughter, both of whom are on the verge of maturity...
...Several of the stories have academic settings, but there is none of the lifelessness that, according to the theoreticians, attends academic themes...
...Hollis Summers in The Weather of February (Harper...
...Curley demands a high degree of cooperation from his leaders, and in "The Appointed Hour"' it may be that he asks too much...
...Just now we have a loud fanfare for Myron Kaufmann's Remember Me to God, a book that is serious in intention but lamentably weak in execution...
...If Mr...
...in which his altitude becomes explicit...
...a quiet novel but an enjoyable one, less dramatic than her Faithful Are the Wounds but distinguished by the same kind of insight...
...These stories are vigorous as well as skillful and a pleasure to read...
...The weakest pait of the book is its conclusion, for there is supposed to be a decisive change in Sprig and the reader cannot quite believe in it...
...I he men, he says...
...On the other hand, such crowded stories as "To ask the Hard Question Is Easy"' and "A Spring" are effective...
...The stories are uneven...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Some Good Fiction Which Won't Get The Popular Attention It Deserves In the publishing business, as everyone knows, a few novels get a good deal of attention and the others get little or none...
...is brutal, meaningless, and without satisfactions of any kind...
...On the other hand, the tale of the Irish boy who gets fed up not merely with the assembly line but with America is fresh and convincing, and the bitterness of "Just One of the Boys" comes through handsomely...
...I begin with May Sarton's The Birth, of a Grandfather (Rinehart...
...to so involved and oblique a story as "The Appointed Hour.'" Like most serious short-story waiters today...
...Perhaps the best example of his skill in this genre is the first story, "Your Children Will Burn," in which hard-boiled realism blends with fantasy in a memorable way...
...Houston...
...the Vanishing American...
...Being too explicit is always more detrimental to a short story than not being explicit enough, hut of course the writer's aim must be to find the exact point at which the reader's imagination is challenged and at the same time rewarded...
...Such stories as "The Mystic Presences'* and "Reginald Pomfret Skelton" are not merely extremely knowing—after all, Mr...
...Houston's death, there was her affair with a married man named Andy...
...Few books are written these days about factory workers, not only because the subject was discredited by the crudities of what once was called "proletarian fiction,' but also, I think, because not many of today's young writers have worked in factories...
...Yellen has been a teacher for more than 25 years—but also dramatic...
...Miss Sarton has chosen to show Sprig only through the eyes of other characters, and since this method, though it tells us much about him, never carries us to the core of his personality, the change is not something we feel...
...The Night of the Two Wakes, and "The Bribe...
...And Random House is getting ready to throw at the public 100,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged, a very long (1,168 pages), very expensive ($6.95), and excruciatingly bad novel by Ayn Rand...
...The works of fiction I am discussing this week—two novels and three collections of short stories—have only one thing in common: They are all likely to receive less attention than they deserve...
...I find myself, at any rate, preferring the relatively simple ones, such as "Saccovanzetti...
...she has her reasons for this, which are all very well, but Mr...
...I wish T could feel that Joe is something more than the author's mouthpiece...
...Summers has succeeded in making the narrator a woman of great charm, an extraordinary but credible blend of naivete and wisdom, romantic and realistic at the same time...
...There are 12 of his stories in That Marriage Bed of Procrustes (Beacon, $3.50...
...Swados makes the point neatly...
...Daniel Curley's short stories have also appeared in the quarterlies, of one of which...
...The central character, however, is different in each story, and each story has its own climax...
...The explanation, I think, lies in a failure of technique, which may in turn result from a failure of nerve...
...Accent, he is an editor...
...When I think ol the satisfaction 1 found in reading this and the other hooks I haw been talking about and the misery I suffered in reading Atlas Shrugged...
...Everything, of course, depends on the quality of Mr...
...and hate themselves...
...Thev are mostly stories of frustration, and the climax of each comes in the moment when the central character is compelled to admit defeat...
...Although one feels in all the stories Mi...
...There is...
...And when the narrator was delivered from that by Mr...
...Yellen's...
...The point of the story is that his return is not wholly a humiliation, and Mr...
...Summers might have considered the convenience of reviewers...
...For that matter, I wish that On the Line taken as a whole didn't seem to me inferior to Mr...
...Yellen adroitly juxtaposes innocence and cynicism, hopefulness and despair...
...The first, Harvey Swados's On the Line (Atlantic Monthly-Little Brown, $3.75), its publisher describes not as a book of short stories but as a "work of fiction," and the distinction has some validity since the stories are closely related, all having the same setting, an automobile assembly line, and having some characters in common...
...After that, and after some experimentation, came the purely unsentimental marriage to the dull Mr...
...Work on the assembly line...
...The narrator, incidentally, refuses to give her name...
...As a general rule, the novels that are ballyhooed are bad—a piece of crude, corny sensationalism such as Peyton Place, a slick contrivance such as The Last Angry Man...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 40
