RECENT FICTION

...He goes back to the village where he was born, and the remembrances of his childhood and of the village life of 50 years ago have a gentle charm...

...THE COCKTAIL PARTY, by T. S. Eliot...

...It is wise and witty, tender and slightly bawdy, comic in the largest sense, where comedy lies close to tragedy...

...That is why, I think, The Wall seemed to me at once a tour de force and—I hate to say it—enormously dull...

...So remarkably well is this diary done, so vivid are the details, so completely has Hersey identified himself with its supposed author through the exercise of a truly amazing power of imagination and sympathy, that it is almost impossible to realize the diary is not real...

...In any case, read it— for some good lines, to see what Eliot is up to these days, and to join in the game...

...190 pp...

...The story takes place in prewar England and tells of an ordinary man who is impelled by the dreariness of his everyday life to get away from it for a little...

...But reading it now, with that future a reality, the nostalgic pictures of an older England fade into a wistful blur, and only the dismal actualities remain in one's memory...

...in its April 1 issue...

...The book is beautifully written— not the least of its achievements are the descriptions, seen through true artist's eyes, of the changing light on the river, or of a shop window full of fish, or of the moon behind a church steeple...

...Jimson is an artist who is perhaps a genius and undoubtedly a rogue, and is as lovable, as crazy, as wholly entertaining a character as any that I have met in modern literature...

...The book has none of the bite and force which we associate with Orwell, and, since it was written before the war, Orwell could only suggest the tragic future which he sensed hung over his little man...

...And Levin-son—or Hersey — writes of what should be really unbearable anguish with such objective detachment that you are scarcely aware of the horror of what you are reading...

...The account of Eileen (yes, sister Eileen) and the psychiatrist is a minor classic, and there are other episodes that will make you laugh out loud and go looking for someone you can read them to...

...One of his characters compares the play to the ink blot tests now so popular with psychiatrists and declares that to say what you think the play means inevitably reveals all sorts of secrets of your own psyche which you would much prefer to keep hidden...

...In the end The Wall becomes—or at least became to me—monotonous...

...My own suspicion (and here I'm going to give myself away after all) is that it really doesn't mean much more than it says...

...Reviewed by Katherine Rodell THERE IS no doubt that John Hersey is a superb reporter...

...I venture to think, too, that perhaps the very fact that it is so literate accounts for some of the more ecstatic Broadway reviews, considering the average of most recent productions...

...Love Story, by Ruth McKenney (and there is another unfortunate title), is an autobiographical account of the author's happily married life during the last ten years or so, but since life never seems to move in a quiet or routine way in the McKenney menage, it is never dull, and is often wildly funny...

...George Orwell's novel, Coming Up For Air, on the other hand, had a depressing effect on me...

...B. Shaw tradition of polite drawing room comedy, and on that level I found it pleasantly provocative and entertaining...

...303 pp...

...On the more serious level of what Eliot's "message" really is, it seems to me that any one's guess is as good as another, and that, too, is entertaining—for a while...

...It is the last of a trilogy (Herself Surprised and To Be a Pilgrim are the others) by the English writer, Joyce Cary, and it deals with the final phase of Gulley Jim-son...

...It is, of course, enormously literate, and witty in the Oscar Wilde-G...

...simply does not come off as a novel It is too discursive, too mundane*, too even in key, so that the sifull as they are of agony and Drama, never have the sharp deflni-tion that brings them to a real climax I found that I was unable to lose myself in any of the characters because Hersey, with his own extraordinary identification with Levinson, was always in the way...

...My only complaint was that at first the device of putting whole conversations into single '.paragraphs confused me, so that it took me a few pages to get used to ,jft But after that I found myself in a wholly different and utterly enchanting world—which is more than enough to ask of any book...

...Not that Love Story is all on that level, for it is not primarily a book of humorous sketches, but it is warm and cheerful and courageous, done with a light touch and full of the McKenney wit which often enough explodes into uproariousness...

...Perhaps the device which Hersey employs, although it reveals to the full his reportorial talent and his breadth of understanding, in the end defeats his purpose as a novelist The book is written in the form of excerpts from the diary of one Noach Levinson, a Jew who lived through those ghastly days and kept a full and almost compulsive record...

...Unfortunately, a reporter, no matter how sensitive, is not, per se, a novelist...

...II The Horse's Mouth (and here is a book that might quite easily, I should think, have been ruined by its title) I found wholly delightful...

...It is almost incredible that a novel that deals with a subject so intrinsically tragic as the systematic extermination of the Jews in the* Warsaw ghetto, and which is written with the utmost seriousness and sympathy, should not have a great emotional impact...

...This is the great achievement of the book, and one for which Hersey de-serves full praise...

...With this warning in mind, I shan't attempt to say what The Cocktail Party does mean, but will only report that I very much enjoyed reading it...

...The New Yorker, which in its subtle way usually manages to come up with the definitive comment on most subjects of current controversy, seems to me to have done just that with James Thurber's essay, entitled "What Cocktail Party...

...LOVE STORY, by Ruth Mc-Kenney...

...But—again, per-haps because of the very form—it...

...And I unqualifiedly recommend the Thurber piece...