New Paperback Novels
UNTERECKER, JOHN
New Paperback Novels By John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY Though the paperback publishers have been generously supplying us with first-rate reprints, "original" anthologies and some...
...Announcers, script writers, directors, actresses struggle blindly in their self-made net of horrible possessive love...
...Only the narrator, who feels sympathy for all the tormented characters, is free of their destructive passions...
...But since he does know all their stories, he can see the terrible design of their interrelated loves, jealousies and hatreds...
...And Knopf has ambitiously started a series of "Borzoi Originals" designed to introduce "new and little-known" authors to as wide an audience as possible at "about one-third the normal price...
...And, though Kerouac's plot is the record of a vast binge of gin, jazz, and sex, his theme is a shout of affirmation: Life is good...
...When Gottlieb, the would-be "man of action," comes accidentally into possession of illegal diamonds, he determines to prove to his partner Fink, "the booster and the talker," that "I am the man to whom things happen...
...So far, Knopf's choices have been good ones...
...A different kind of blind action is the subject matter of Evergreen's best publicized new novel, Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans ($1.45...
...One of the best, Dan Jacobsons The Price of Diamonds ($1.451...
...their audience is after substance, not format...
...Yet he, too, experiences anguish...
...Few people buy paperbacks for their prestige value or for their beautiful bindings...
...Jacobson's...
...Paperbacks, by and large, are not reviewed, and publishers hesitate to gamble on the soft-cover publication of a work which is likely to be critically ignored and then literally buried in a shelf full of reprints a week after it appears in the bookstores...
...It is enough that they tell me everything...
...Kerouac, immensely talented and self-consciously undisciplined, organizes his novel around the remembered fragments of an end-of-love letter from Mardou, a wide-eyed "young, sexy, slender, strange, hip" Indian-Negro girl, to Leo Percepied, the "jazz-mad" French Canadian hero of the novel...
...The soft-cover books are strictly a consumer item...
...Pain, confusion, love—the whole jumbled chaos of our existence—everything is to be accepted, is to be welcomed, with joy...
...Because she is working with so many individuals, no one of whom is more important to the novel than any other, the book has even less plot than Mr...
...Jacobson, who severely restricts his novel to the action of its two central characters, Kay Cicellis in Ten Seconds from Now (Evergreen, $1.45) uses her novel to present a cross-section of a group of only loosely related people, the staff of a Greek radio station...
...thus a pair of "types," as we come to know them, expand from caricatures into persons...
...The reason seems obvious...
...I pick up a chair to bash him with, everybody's watching but I continue the daydream and I look into his eyes and I see suddenly the glare of a jester angel who made his presence on earth all a joke and I realize that this too with Mardou was a joke and I think, 'Funny Angel, elevated amongst the subterraneans.' " Though the tone of the book seems to have struck its reviewers as antisocial (anti-conventional would have been a more accurate word), fundamentally it celebrates the wonder and the mystery of living men, "the great men I had known in my youth, great heroes of America I'd been buddies with, with whom I'd adventured and gone to jail and known in raggedy dawns, the boys beat on curbstones seeing symbols in the saturated gutter, the Rimbauds and Verlaines of America on Times Square, kids...
...In Leo's world, as in Miss Cicellis's, there is both pain and hatred, but they are present only to underscore ecstasy...
...Though things do happen to Gottlieb, more than he bargains for, the novel focuses on character rather than on plot, on the complex interactions of greed and fear which threaten to transform Gottlieb completely...
...New Paperback Novels By John Unterecker Instructor of English, CCNY Though the paperback publishers have been generously supplying us with first-rate reprints, "original" anthologies and some really very important new literary studies, most of them have hesitated to take on the publication of new fiction...
...Holding it together is a crippled narrator who hears all their stories: "I don't want to know their motives...
...Unlike Mr...
...is an expertly-constructed moral tale about the comic but painful involvement of two South African importers in an elaborate scheme of mutual deception...
...He realizes that his isolation brings him only lonely insight, that the observer freed from the human rat race is freed also from humanity itself, that he becomes a thing finally more meaningless than the lust-driven figures he observes...
...After he has lost his girl, Leo remembers a dream in which he and his rival had fought: "I see myself grabbing Yuri by the shirt and throwing him on the floor, he pulls out a Yugoslavian knife...
...For the same reason, young, up-and-coming authors and those with a reputation to uphold undoubtedly think twice before agreeing to a paperback first edition...
...On the other hand, the paperbacks provide, almost automatically because of their low price and wide distribution, a bigger and in many ways a better audience than that which is available to the hard-cover publisher...
...It is encouraging to report, therefore, that at least two publishers are experimenting with relatively large printings of new works which in hardcover first editions would almost certainly have had very limited sales...
...As the phrases of the letter evoke memories, Leo reconstructs his own world of meaningless joy...
...Grove Press, through its Evergreen paperbacks, has begun regular publication of original—and often unusual—fiction...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 23
