RECENT FICTION
Rodell, Katherine
Recent Fiction THE AGE OF LONGING, by Arthur Kocstler. Macmillan. 362 pp. $3.50. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. by James Jones. Charles Scribner's Sons. 860 pp. $4.50. A BREATH OF AIR. by Rumer...
...From Here to Eternity is a magnificent documentary, but it is more than that...
...THE YELLOW STORM, by Lau Shaw...
...There is that sort of insight on scores of pages in this book...
...The Yellow Storm, by Lau Shaw, is one of those long family tales where you have to have a chart to keep the people straight...
...Rumer Godden's A Breath of Air, a delightful re-telling of Shakespeare's Tempest, is fragile, tenuous, but charming...
...Above and beyond his sensitivity in feeling out the way human beings react to one another, he has thought about those relationships with a clarity and a fresh vision that would be surprising anywhere and is amazing considering his age...
...It is slight and rather charming, and, again, one can't quite see why anyone would bother to write it...
...It is all there—the river, the heat, the natives, the white men going to pieces in the tropics, and the white men who are fighting through the wilderness to save their own souls— but it is just not quite credible...
...He needs an authority, an absolute, as, says Koestler, all men do...
...This demand for certainty, for an answer, for a father, is not new, nor is it peculiar to Koestler...
...But he writes with such sincerity, with such passion, with such an eye and ear for facts and such an understanding of the subtleties of human relationship that I at least was only too willing to overlook the obvious, and rather unimportant, defects...
...If Jones ever wins his battle with the English language, he is going to be one of our most prized and distinguished possessions—an author as American as Mark Twain and as contemporary as today, who can sit up there with the best of them...
...I have always thought that the touchstone for the validity of a new idea was when you meet it with almost a sense of recognition, and say to yourself, "Of course...
...I don't know when I have ever been so completely immersed in a book...
...276 pp...
...Why didn't I ever think of putting it that way...
...But it seems a pity that he cannot somehow come to know the philosophy of individual dignity and freedom which is the basis of our society, and probably the world's last best hope...
...THE LOVED AND ENVIED...
...It is sunk in a tragic hopelessness that is as self-defeating as it is defeated...
...by Rumer Godden...
...It is full of improbabilities, but it has some amusing characters, and, like Miss Godden's book, it has a literate-ness which lifts it above the common run of feminine fiction...
...The Viking Press...
...by James Ramsey Ullman...
...it has too much life and sympathy and compassion for that...
...It is straight reporting, and soldiers do talk that way—but that is largely irrelevant to the book itself...
...This, too, isn't a bad book, and it has the merit of being a deeply sincere one, but it follows an old pattern (The Good Earth, etc...
...And for goodness' sake ignore those who gasp about the book's language...
...From Here to Eternity, the much-talked-of book by James Jones, is one of the most utterly absorbing books I have ever read...
...Harcourt, Brace & Co...
...Lippincott...
...Read it, and watch for more...
...Obviously, too, religion in any of its present forms is not the answer, for the heroine of the book has lost her faith .and has nothing to cling to...
...Then perhaps his really great gifts would not be so wasted in defeatism and despair...
...It is not a bad book, nor actually a dull one—it just doesn't come off...
...444 pp...
...I should save it for a hot summer's day...
...280 pp...
...Those of us who have been fortunate enough to be brought up in the Anglo-American tradition, where the most intolerable thing in the world is the absence of personal freedom, can perhaps find sympathy for Koestler's hero, but never identification with him...
...Koestler's only answer is a vague, mystical hope of a new religion which will arise somewhere in the east of Europe and will supply the absolutes which are so sadly lacking elsewhere...
...For Koestler's hero is suddenly given his freedom from his Russian masters, and finds it unbearable...
...It takes place in China during the Japanese occupation, and dreadful things happen to everybody, but they keep bravely on, and in the end of course they triumph...
...I don't quite see why anyone would want to write such a book, but it is undeniably pleasant to read...
...by Enid Bagnold...
...It is not that Jones writes well, because he doesn't...
...I suppose that now, under the McCarran bill, Koestler could not be admitted to this country, since he is an ex-communist...
...River of the Sun, by James Ramsey Ullman, is an adventure story in the Amazon region of Brazil which is somehow never quite convincing...
...The Loved and Envied, by Enid Bagnold, is summer reading too...
...Doubleday...
...Obviously Communism is not the answer, for Koestler is as bitter as ever about it, with the bitterness of a believer who has been betrayed...
...Reviewed by Katherine Rodell ARTHUR KOESTLER'S new book is a chronicle of despair and desperation...
...too closely ever to achieve any real life of its own...
...He has some tricks of what I can hardly bear to dignify as style that are infuriating, and, what is more to the point, distracting...
...The thing that is odd is that a man of his intelligence should be so unaware of a whole segment of human thought and action...
...RIVER OF THE SUN...
...533 pp...
...It is enormously long—probably too long—but for the four days it took me to read it I was in the Army...
...For Jones is also an author who thinks...
...Don't listen to the people who will tell you that the book is sordid and bitter...
Vol. 15 • May 1951 • No. 5
