Living With Books

...More rigorous definitions will work up to a point, but I have never seen one that wouldn't exclude a fair proportion of masterpieces...

...There are tightly plotted stories, and there are stories presented in the form of personal reminiscence...

...More puzzling is Mary McCarthy's "Yellowstone Park," which is a chapter not from a forthcoming novel but from a forthcoming autobiography, a book that will presumably be classed as non-fiction...

...He writes with power and originality, but not always with discrimination, and he does not seem to have learned when to let well enough alone...

...There are two other stories on the same theme that aren't so good...

...The best of the three, probably the best in the book, describes realistically the consequences of a homosexual scandal in a boys' school...

...Able Baker (Atlantic-Little Brown, $3.75) is Joseph Whitehill's first book, and he too is, as he has a right to be, a young man of promise...

...only television has been able to keep up with his facility...

...Whitehill's knowledge in yet another field, but the facts do not swamp the story...

...This might suggest that the stories are abstract parables...

...The title story, about a ship's engineer, has a good character, a neat plot and a lot of impressive detail...

...Here the author's curious kind of precise knowledge, his tendency toward satire, and his feeling for the nonconforming individual find expression in a style that is freer and more idiomatic than that he usually employs...

...No matter how much an individual writer may experiment with style and technique, his stories always seem alike in important ways...

...One of them, "The Day of the Last Rock Fight," is in the form of a boy's letter to his father, and this is unfortunate, for Mr.White-hill cannot keep his own style out of the writing, but it is a moving story just the same...

...What, he inquires in "The Man Who Vanished," would happen to a man whose body was absent whenever his mind was...

...They aren't at all...

...on the contrary, Coates is remarkably successful in accomplishing what the texts on short-story writing call "reader identification...

...Of the other stories in the book, three—"The Academicians," "The Surrogate" and "The Propagandist"—are quite shamelessly contrived, though in each of them there are admirably solid scenes...

...Yet nothing happens that could not have happened under the circumstances, and in the end the reader, along with Chuck, sees the logic of the pattern...

...But none of the three other stories about Baker is as good...

...It is interesting to turn from a volume in which there is so much variety to volumes by individual authors...

...William Faulkner's "By the People" is not one of his best, but it has some good Faulkner in it...

...What Coates does as a rule is either to present situations that seem bizarre, though they can be realistically explained, or to invent situations that are deliberately fantastic, though he strives to make us accept them as real...

...It is one of the warmest of the stories, but there is more warmth in the others than one might suppose at first reading...

...This woman's sufferings are real enough, and are made real to us, but of course we know that they are caused by her mental state and that therefore they can be ended, as in fact they are...

...One is implausibly melodramatic, one is essentially a variation of the original theme, and the third is merely tricky...

...This story makes me believe that he may become an important writer and not merely a commercially successful one...

...but the strength of the story lies in the overwhelming plausibility of his suspicions...

...The story, however, does not seem to the reader to differ in any striking way from a number of others that are told in the first person...

...living with books By Granville Hicks The Prize Short Stories of the Year And Three New Individual Collections When E. M. Forster was looking for a working definition of the novel, he was forced to content himself with one borrowed from a French critic, Abel Chevalley—"a piece of fiction of a certain extent...

...Young Man with a Spear" exhibits Mr...

...Strange things happen to Chuck Corcoran when he takes it into his head, after a few drinks, to pretend to hold up a passerby...

...A couple of the stories are rather simple and personal, but even in these there is an element of the unexpected...

...Greenleaf" is a picture of a harassed woman—a woman surrounded by both evil and incompetence, a woman who has been deformed by her long struggle but at least has managed to prevail, only to be stricken down by a cruel accident...

...A Thirsty Evil is Vidal's ninth book in eleven years, and it seems reasonable to say that he is too prolific and too versatile for his own good...

...Elliott's, also a reminiscence, is gentle and delicate...

...Three of the stories—by Richard Thurman, Arthur Granit and Eugene Walter—have a fine kind of humorous extravagance...

...What, Coates asks in one of the more forthright fantasies, would happen if the law of averages should cease to operate...

...A person with an ice-cold hand—his right hand, which people ever after remember when once they have grasped it...

...As a matter of fact, it wouldn't be easy to find any other definition that would fit all the selections in Prize Stories 1957 (Doubleday, $3.95), the 37th volume in the 0. Henry Award series, edited this year by Paul Engle with the assistance of Constance Urdang...

...Engle gave the first prize this year to Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf," and he could not have done better...

...Here is another harassed woman, a sick woman on a cruise to the West Indies, made miserable by all the discomforts of the trip, afflicted by a voluble cabin mate, and exposed to the attentions of a persistent and, as it seems to her, sinister doctor...

...Three Stratagems" and "Pages from an Abandoned Journal" seek in a somewhat disconcerting fashion to involve the reader more deeply in the special world of the homosexual...

...A Friendly Game of Cards" depends on a simple twist...

...Most of Coates's stories seem to have begun with ideas, as Hawthorne's did, and one can imagine his keeping such a journal as Hawthorne kept...

...What would happen to a man, more especially to his love life, if he could read other people's thoughts...

...Robert Coates's The Hour After Westerly (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50) is...

...The ideas, to be sure, grow out of experience, and, if they become stories, are embodied in experience, but they have for a time an independent existence as ideas...

...Gold's story, "An Encounter in Haiti," is told in the form of a reminiscence, in appearance a rather casual reminiscence, but it makes its point by way of a vigorous and dramatic conclusion...

...Perhaps the least effective is the one about the Greek gods, "An Autumn Fable," which asks the kind of question Coates isn't prepared to answer...

...a simple incident of childhood is made to carry a good deal of weight...

...The three stories printed last in the book—I have no idea in what order the stories were written—seem the most serious...

...The seven stories in Gore Vidal's A Thirsty Evil (Zero Press, $3.00) do not hang together, but there is a tone that pervades the whole book...

...For the purposes of this book, in other words, it is a short story, although it may turn out to be something else in Miss McCarthy's book...

...Three of the stories are concerned with homosexuality...

...The logic that led Forster to this conclusion compels us to define the short story as "a piece of fiction of less than a certain extent...

...There is an interesting parallel between Miss O'Connor's stiiry unci Jean Stafford's " The Warlock...

...A stray leaf from the book of fate, picked up in the street...

...In "Accident at the Inn" and "Rendezvous" the reader can guess what is going to happen, but—and this is the point—the victim can't...

...the travelers met on shipboard are what they claim to be, not what Charlie Beckett's suspicious mind makes them out to be...

...The first story in the book, "In a Foreign City," is an example of fantasy that isn't fantasy at all...

...Cheever's story, as I have said, is very fine, and quite unlike most of his stories...

...As she proved in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Miss O'Connor is one of our best short-story writers, and "Greenleaf" is as good as anything in that volume...

...One story, John Cheever's "The Journal of an Old Gent," is, it turns out, a chapter of a forthcoming novel, but it is a story and a fine one...

...To go back to the prize stories, second and third prizes were awarded to Herbert Gold and George P. Elliott, the former already well known as a novelist, the latter beginning to be known for his short stories...

...The Need" and "The Decline and Fall of Perry Whitman," for instance, touch on the sense of unfinished business that haunts everyone's life—the cruelties and betrayals unatoned for, the obligations never settled...

...Wyatt Blassingame's "Man's Courage" is an uncommonly good story of Negro-white conflict...

...He plays the game of "What would happen if . .?" the way most of us play it...

...Miss O'Connor does not have a high opinion of the human species: The worst people in her stories are unspeakably dreadful, and the best are none too good...

...Thornton Wilder in The Cabala answered convincingly a question of the same sort...

...Perhaps the most effective of the fantasies is the title story, in which it is left to the reader to imagine what has happened in the hour Davis Harwell has lost...

...The Oracle" deals with something even simpler—the restorative effect of an act of good will...

...For Miss O'Connor's heroine there can be no such easy deliverance, and her story touches us more deeply...

...We also have a characteristic but not particularly distinguished reminiscence of childhood, an unsuccessful extravaganza, and two fairly interesting fantasies...

...He knows what is on our minds...

...But he is only 29, and there is reason to hope that he is acquiring a sense of direction, which is what he needs...

...The truly fantastic stories are all based on the logical consequences of an assumption...

...There are other excellent stories...

...however, a more homogeneous collection than most, and what holds it together is his sense of the unpredictability of life...

...And "Thanks Very Much, But No Thank You" is wholly satisfying...

...What is disconcerting is Vidal's uncertainty as to how far he shall go...

...Certainly he has considerable gifts, so considerable that it is easy for him to abuse them...

...It is a pleasant coincidence that both Gold and Elliott currently hold Hudson Review Fellowships...

...At this late date, not in his life but in his publishing career, he remains a young man of promise...