RECENT FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes THE SCORES of books about Asia now appearing may serve to remind us that the East is even more diversified and divided, yet also less mysterious, than we...
...the intent, although admittedly narrow, is never lost sight of...
...An Asian speaks in restrained and strangely beautiful language, and with much dignity, about and for her country in Some Inner Fury (John Day...
...246 pp...
...Anderson has written a new kind of American war novel, one in which action is subordinated to character, and political and social theorizing are uniquely lacking...
...Prescott somehow manages to write for the New York Times four book reviews a week that are not only acute and provocative, but firmly based on a belief in ethical obligation, duty and honor, and kindness, mercy, and love...
...For every Jew there are two worlds, and for the child born of mixed marriage these may become many worlds...
...The author projects the dilemma into the universal-ism that all men are of divided loyalties, and that self-understanding, discipline, and freedom grow from within rather than being imposed from without...
...243 pp...
...Once more there is the universalism which makes all of us part of the 1900 years of persecution and sorrow, for "all men are Jews, and all men have lost their Jerusalem...
...Consul to Indochina, in Robert Shaplen's A Forest of Tigers (Knopf...
...342 pp...
...Graham Greene demonstrates an equal facility in The Quiet American (Viking...
...An exciting tiger hunt in India provides the framework in which the myth of man's supposedly inviolate isolation and independence is shattered...
...Reviewer reviewing reviewer is perhaps an impertinence, yet I do want to mention Orville Prescott's urbane, informed, and amusing The Five-Dollar Gold Piece (Random House...
...249 pp...
...4.50), which supplements but does not substantially amplify the dicta and attitudes of the founder of Imagism in Speculations, except for his rather pathetic "Diary from the Trenches" and his futile and losing debate with Bertrand Russell on World War I...
...Nothing is allowed to distort the focus on character development, nor are there stereotypes of situation, people, or language...
...The Pillar of Salt (Criterion...
...3.95...
...The author has simplified the contradictory motives of the Empress, and considerably modified events by emphasizing some and ignoring others in order to create sympathy for Tzu Hsi, while unfolding the origins and evolution of modern China...
...the quiet American, a U.S...
...3.50) by Thomas Anderson, about a company of U.S...
...Kamala Markan-daya tells of the love between a Hindu girl and a young Britisher, and of its loss through one terrible act of violence in the great struggle for freedom...
...Black here shows more than his usual skill in directing the materials toward a satisfying and meaningful climax, even though he does at times sound like a junior Hemingway...
...The writing is fresh and clear...
...In a few chapters of The Strong Hand (Little, Brown...
...That in the United States the problems of the Jew may be equally poignant, if less fateful, is shown in a first novel by young Sam Astrachan, An End to Dying (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy...
...316 pp...
...brought up a Jew in strict adherence to the law, he learns to free himself from the literalism of the Torah while yet retaining its human worth and spiritual value...
...The book is less historical fiction than it is fictionalized history...
...the narrator, a cynical British newspaper man...
...230 pp...
...In his heroic effort to make men of soldiers, and soldiers of men, Sergeant Stanley loses his own individuality, becomes a symbol, and ultimately a martyr to his own sense of mission, and to his inability to face the reality of failure...
...This is a fine novel, of piercing sensitivity and profound perception, and its harrowing events, followed by the calm decision in favor of the individual over the group, are in the central stream of contemporary literature...
...Two volumes of rather more formal criticism are John Paul Pritchard's Criticism in America (University of Oklahoma Press...
...There is simplicity, purity, and power in her writing such as one rarely finds, and to read her is a great joy-Some of the recent novels that have used the Orient as their locale have done so to provide a dramatic backdrop for the action...
...3.95) by David Walker, British author of a number of excellent books...
...official who wants to form a "third force" and whose arming of natives leads only to assassination...
...Only a little less innocent an American is Adam Patch, U.S...
...255 pp...
...3.50...
...Miss Buck remains a master story teller, and every page is absorbing reading as it discloses the lonely and tragic life of a great woman caught in the still raging conflict between the old and the new...
...This casual autobiography traces the development of that point of view...
...Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes THE SCORES of books about Asia now appearing may serve to remind us that the East is even more diversified and divided, yet also less mysterious, than we sometimes imagine...
...376 pp...
...The scene is Saigon during the civil war...
...some of his characters, especially Jacob and David, have a crude vigor and strength quite commendable...
...373 pp...
...The novel reveals an ambiguity of purpose and meaning which seems to derive from the intellectual malaise of spiritual pride...
...Yet in the words of the rabbi's father and in the tempered lamentations of his son there are eloquence and passion leading to the realization that Judaism has to teach all of us that every moment of life can be sanctified by being felt and enjoyed to the full in humility and thankfulness...
...3.75) by Albert Memmi is an autobiographical novel about the loneliness and isolation of the son of a Berber mother and a Jewish father...
...Green's morality appears based on arrogance of soul and confusion of mind...
...325 pp...
...318 pp...
...soldiers cut off for twenty-four hours by the enemy in Korea, and the patrol which scouts a route for its escape, examines one of the fundamental paradoxes of leadership...
...Your Own Beloved Sons (Random House...
...Astrachan's people are boisterous yet bowed, energetic yet mystic...
...All in all, a cowardly sort of malice...
...Another such use of Asian locale is Harry Black (Houghton, Mifflin...
...5), which while too heavily weighted in favor of the Nineteenth Century, and too little concerned with broad movements of themes and ideas, is a helpful guide, and T. E. Hulme's long posthumous Further Speculations (University of Minnesota Press...
...Yet he puts his judgments into the mouth of the journalist—an opium smoker, a deserter of fair women, a seducer of the innocent, a man involved in life only insofar as such involvement necessitates neither commitment nor decision...
...3.75) Michael Blankfort proclaims both the mission of Judaism in America, and its ultimate significance to the world...
...3.50...
...4.95) by Pearl Buck, a "biography" of Tzu Hsi, last and most bewildering Empress of China...
...3.50), although he deliberately employs a deceiving narrative device...
...This love story between a young rabbi and an unorthodox intellectual Jew, somewhat awkwardly narrated by a Hollywood script writer, is not entirely satisfactory because there is lacking the direct and intense vision one finds in Memmi...
...The narrator, a first-generation American, finds after a trip to Europe both the beauty and the meaning of the Judaism he has nearly abandoned, and the novel ends with his claiming his heritage that his "God is the God of Israel...
...3.50...
...But Shaplen, if no match for Greene as a novelist, at least knows that "there is no way of compromise with freedom," and presumably also no compromise in cowardice...
...In the unheroic hero compete the traditions of the Arab, the Jew, the Algerian national, and the French...
...With all the faults of poor because designedly "clever" construction, and with much material not well integrated, it yet epitomizes not only the history of one family of Russian Jews, but also through its use of Judaic folklore and wisdom the history of all Jewish immigrants to this country...
...The most popular of these books will undoubtedly be Imperial Woman (John Day...
...226 pp...
...Essentially the same issues are involved, essentially the same defeat of innocence...
...He sits in harsh judgment against the innocent and therefore dangerous American who would cure age-old ills with adolescent good will...
Vol. 20 • May 1956 • No. 5
