FICTION, ASSORTED

...And O'Hara, in plotting their tragi-comic ambitions, affairs, moods, and frustrations, is sympathetic to the selves who are the characters without becoming wholly identified with them...

...1), in which he defines some of the concepts and feelings held in common by the founder of psychoanalysis and by many writers, he notes that just as literature is concerned with "self," and with "selves," so the "intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement...

...the evil of some men and the goodness of others: "Doesn't each one of us have an inner America on which in youth his heart is set...

...John O'Hara has been writing honest, although uneven and sometimes unsuccessful, fiction for twenty years, His latest novel, Ten North Frederick (Random House...

...the surviving British sailors, in order to exist, indulge in cannibalism after three weeks of near starvation...

...he worships it, but understands little of its meaning and purpose, and he blinds himself to the driving selfishness and the overweening pride of men like McCall...

...Divorces, adulteries, highballs, art, and much talk are her materials, but they are not substantial enough to bear the force of her censure, which presumably is aimed at the false, the fake, the insincere...

...Artine Artinian...

...275 pp...

...Yet I still have hopes that Miss McCarthy will outgrow this delight in adolescent faultfinding and learn that people are more important than books about them...

...408 pp...

...Her biting wit, cutting sarcasm, and sharp phrasing always seem to be without point...

...Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy have issued several "jumbo" volumes of proportions wholly impossible in paper binding, which together make a wealth of good reading...

...3.75) is about a winter shipwreck on a bleak, rocky island off the New England coast, in 1710...

...One is to make arrangements for simultaneous issuance in both formats, as has been done with The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse (World...

...yet it is valuable as a kind of history of the development of many of the tendencies of modern poetry...

...he only plays by them, and wins...

...In these last three novels there is neither complete acceptance nor total rejection of our culture, but rather ambivalence, which Lionel Trilling would insist is also characteristic of every great writer of the modern period...

...Seven by Colette reprints much from the earlier Dial volume as well as several novels not heretofore easily available...

...Cash is motivated not by a desire for money, but evidently by a creative, or conservative, urge...

...The history of this family is told through complex but beautifully handled flashbacks...

...5 Novels by Moravia may serve to measure the real and remarkable stature of this novelist too often dismissed as a literary panderer because of his emphasis on sex...

...What seems most likely to have permanent place in our literature are her faithful translations from the Chinese, Fir-Flower Tablets, where the form and content of the originals inhibited the crudeness which mars much of her other poetry...

...Hawley knows big business thoroughly...

...a dominating wife, who would rather have a puppet for a husband than an independent man, spoils both their marriage and their children, and his political party has little use for his weak idealism...

...The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Loioell (Houghton Mifflin...

...Roberts has written a fine story of human courage and endurance, told with a chilling and harrowing direct-ness, and yet he also manages an allegory on America, Boon Island, and...

...Chapin's failure is also external...

...Fiction, Assorted by E. Nelson Hayes SEVERAL months ago a leading picture magazine pontificated that much of our "best" fiction during the past thirty years has lacked the "redeeming quality of spiritual purpose," has not expounded "the joy of life itself...

...212 pp...

...3.95), whose new hero buys and sells —only incidentally at large profit— companies and corporations on the verge of bankruptcy or under tired and inefficient management...

...Mary McCarthy is less sympathetic toward her characters, and less intelligible to her readers...

...The more than 60 forgeries included in earlier editions have been omitted here, several newly discovered stories added, and the best translations used...

...670 pp...

...Hanover House has prepared the first definitive Collected Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (1339 pp...

...6) is disappointing in that most of her verse now seems dead both in spirit and in letter...

...This excursion into literary criticism then cites Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morn-ingstar as marking a promising change toward the affirmative...

...With the crudeness of the fakes put aside, and with careful editorial attention to the original language and spirit, the collection enables us to see Maupassant as a profound genius of this genre, to whom virtually every subsequent writer of short stories owes a considerable debt, and to understand him as a romantic naturalist rather than as a purveyor of French spice...

...Those who believe that Faulkner's work is entirely a morbid reflection of, and pessimistic commentary on, moral and intellectual decay, should read these for their masculine vitality, spirit of adventure, and good humor...

...This collection of poetry from Colonial times to the present is distinguished both as a record of intelligent and sensitive taste, and by the inclusion of mnny new poeis of the post-World War II decade, who cancel out some of the Nineteenth Century mediocrities necessarily represented...

...444 pp...

...Finally, mention should be made of Big Woods by William Faulkner (Random House...

...607 pp...

...He is surrounded by men and women who at first distrust him, then, as they come to understand his actions and logic, admire him as a little Christ of the corporations...

...Both he and his minions are empty of life, of dignity...

...59 pp...

...3.95) she writes of an unconvincing group of pseudo-intellectuals in a tolerant Cape Cod town...

...He piously explains that he wants to expose the gap between ethics and law in contemporary America, while from the other side of his mouth he rationalizes that he did not make the rules of tax exemptions and deductions, capital gains, stock and bond regulations...

...f 3.95), con-tinues the human comedy of Gibbs-ville, Pennsylvania, already explored, mapped, and gazetteered in A Rage to Live, Appointment in Samarra, and others...

...beginning, middle, and end, and cause and effect, are known to the reader in the detail and with the conviction that only a masterful novelist can convey...

...313 pp...

...3.50), edited by the indefatigable compiler Oscar Williams, which is also appearing as a Pocket Book...

...In A Charmed Life (Harcourt, Brace...

...Despite Alfred Kazin's stricture, as noted by Hilton Kramer in the December issue of The Progressive, that there is less and less literature today, and more and more intellectualizing masquerading in its place, some contemporary authors go right on striving after, if not always achieving, the truth which is fiction...

...He now surveys the life of Benjamin Chapin, a decent but ineffectual man who aspires to the Presidency but gets no further in his ambition than a large contribution to the Republican war chest...

...5.95), with an enlightening introduction by Prof...

...Kenneth Roberts' Boon Island (Doubleday...

...New Editions and Anthologies Publishers of hard-cover books are meeting the competition from paperbacks in several ways...

...In his stimulating Freud and the Crisis of Our Age (Beacon...

...To these two novels may now be added Cash McCall by Cameron Haw-ley (Houghton, Mifflin...

...3.95), which contains four hunting stories (one, "Race at Morning," was not previously available in book form) and is splendidly illustrated by Edward Shenton...

...they are manipulated in fiction to justify manipulation in finance, the real protagonist of the novel...

...and if—because of age, or greed, or weakness of will, or circumstances beyond his poor control—it escapes him, his life, to my way of thinking, has been wasted...