SUMMER FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Summer Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes IRWIN SHAW'S best novel to date, Lucy Crown (Random House. 338 pp. $3.95), plots the aftermaths of wifely adultery, the "upper-middle-class American woman's form...
...This is a drawing room comedy of what might have been a bedroom farce, and ends with the reunited couple finding in the novel written by her ex-paramour, now dead from the shotgun blast of a jealous lover, a portrait of herself as the perfect woman...
...Udomo manipulates fear and hate, even though for unselfish ends, and sacrifices friends, compromises principles, and loses his own humaneness in order to win his partial victory...
...3), but with a new introduction by James T. Farrell, and no mention of Fast...
...3.95) has the husband and wife commit small adulteries that reveal the emotional sterilities and intellectual pretensions of their marriage...
...3.50), shows a broader range of interests than his earlier books of macabre stories and continues the same remarkable narrative skill...
...The novel is richly detailed, the characters pathetically human, and the dilemma a failure of moral nerve all too common...
...3.95), plots the aftermaths of wifely adultery, the "upper-middle-class American woman's form of self-expression...
...3.95) analyzes with limited success the corrupt career of Mike Free-smith, who uses and abuses others to gain power for himself...
...In Pemmican (Doubleday...
...but not the last, expressed most terribly in tribalism which, although it denies individualism, gives "security, color, and emotional outlets that the bleak, standardized, monotonous chromium, and neon benefits of mass production civilization lack...
...312 pp...
...320 pp...
...Finally, in 1947 World Publishing Company issued The Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser, edited with an introduction by Howard Fast...
...319 pp...
...The enemies, and the enemies also of all such movements among colonial people, are the white man, poverty, and the past...
...191 pp...
...Sic transit gloria mundi...
...Especially effective is his use of dialogue, every word of which contributes to the realization of character, the advancement of story, and the enrichment of theme...
...332 pp...
...The Stories of Liam O'Flaherty (Devin-Adair...
...Especially subtle and almost convincing is the parallel between poetry and religion, carefully developed through the personality, writings, and suicide of Home Watts, who might well be taken for Harte Crane...
...To this formula, Peter Abrahams adds the compulsive need for freedom...
...The first two he can defeat...
...3.95) he tells of Western-educated Udomo who returns to his native country of Panafrica to lead a successful and bloodless revolution against British rule and to build a new state...
...In a different mood, one of gentle irony and compassionate understanding rather than restrained passion, L. P. Hartley in A Perfect Woman (Knopf...
...2.95), in which he sketches with a humor edged with irony the petty pride, ambition, and sloth of some pastors, curates, and parishioners in this country...
...Yet it is a passionate cry for the meaning and dignity and worth of individualism in a society that seems to be more and more frightened by it...
...414 pp...
...Miss Howard then takes a long view back through the years to explain the inevitability of the present by the inheritance of the past...
...433 pp...
...3.95) by Caroline Gordon, wife of Allen Tate, in the person of a modern poet gone dry who regains life and art through conversion to Catholicism...
...In A Wreath for Udomo (Knopf...
...3.75) opens with a pitiless portrait of a family— the brilliant, erratic husband has skipped to greener pasturing, the daughter is pregnant by the wrong man, the dull son is marrying a duller girl, and the wife is left sitting amidst these ruins of a middle-class marriage falsely built on sensuality, wit, and fear...
...5), although narrow of theme and monotonously similar in style and structure, are basically Irish folk narratives which speak movingly of struggle against the cruelties and hardships imposed by an indifferent Nature...
...The same failure appears in The Malefactors (Harcourt, Brace...
...Burdick implies that his formula "f plus h equals p" is sure-fire, and then weasels out by having a good man kill Mike and get away with it...
...Eugene Burdick, who teaches political theory at the University of California, has cast into fictional form his theory that power is gained and held through the manipulation of mass fear and hate...
...Another Catholic writer, J. F. Powers, has written a second volume of short stories, The Presence of Grace (Doubleday...
...Only the death of the once domineering, now masochistic husband makes possible the purging of guilt and the reconciliation between the pseudo-passionate mother and the deeply embittered son...
...The sin is forgiven but not forgotten...
...3.95) by the versatile Vardis Fisher, the history of the early Nineteenth Century war in Canada between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North Westers is told with gusto, and a realism that lovers of the genteel historical novel may find revolting...
...The descriptions of frontier life and of Indian ways, and particularly of white women among red men, make for high reading...
...husband and wife sacrifice their son and slowly destroy each other in order to continue the empty gestures of an empty marriage...
...Shaw develops his materials with commendable skill, never succumbing to the lures of mere arti-ness and trickery...
...357 pp...
...His novel, The Ninth Wave (Houghton, Mifflin...
...4.50) by young Ivan Obolensky is a chronicle of small-town sins and corruption written in a crazy-quilt style that at times seems almost to parody Wolfe and Faulkner...
...Rogues' March (Random House...
...363 pp...
...256 pp...
...Now they reprint the same volume (349 pp...
...With a Presidential election coming up, it is well to look honestly at the motives and means of politics...
...A new collection by William San-som, A Contest of Ladies (Reynal...
...His dialogues and descriptions are lively, his characters honestly conceived...
...I especially like to find maverick novels for maverick readers, being one of the latter myself...
...Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Long View (Reynal...
Vol. 20 • August 1956 • No. 8
