RECENT FICTION
Hayes, E. Nelson
Recent Fiction by E. Nelson Hayes ROBERT GRAVES' latest, They Hanged My Saintly Billy (Dou-bleday. 312 pp. $3.95), is a defense of Dr. William Palmer, who was publicly hanged in 1856 after one of...
...The nine extended episodes which comprise her autobiography of childhood, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (Harcourt, Brace...
...3.75), in which the suicide of an associate and friend, and the octopus demands of business and suburban community upon the individual trigger a man to realize that he is leading a schizophrenic life, that he is no longer a whole man because society requires that he be many different and conflicting fragments...
...A mediocre novel, On the Beach by Nevil Shute (Morrow...
...3.75), in which Evelyn Waugh gives a fictional account of his own brief bout of hallucination...
...Set in Australia in 1963, it records the last months of human life on earth following World War III...
...3.75), a novel of personal eccentricities, scenic oddities, and plot absurdities as a young woman journeys through the Middle East proselytizing as an Anglican and dreaming and loving as a mystic...
...In a sense, this is a kind of Tristram Shandy feminized...
...288 pp...
...3.95) will be savored by many a reader in the next few months, and probably for the wrong reason...
...4), is an intimate portrait of Maurice Goudeket, her third husband, written with uncommon good sense and an admirable lack of sentimentality...
...232 pp...
...Through its pages we may relive the sickening emotions of combat...
...At any rate, its salty people and saltier episodes are fine reading, sparkling with wit and leavened by love...
...3.50), a story about a zany team of songwriters and their women...
...3.95) arouses fear with terrifying force...
...The result is a rousing good story told in a dry, witty manner, although it is little more...
...In this novel, he takes the story of a famous disappearance, and of the attendant murders in a family feud and in a bloody conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders, and phrases it in the classic lines of tragedy...
...Propaganda calculated to make us realize the consequences of atomic and hydrogen explosions, its ending of universal death from radioactive poisoning is so inevitable as to be beyond human choice and will, and therefore beneath the dignity of tragedy...
...The emotions to which we most respond in a novel are usually those which we experience either too little or too much, and of these perhaps fear is the paramount one in our time—fear of war and fear of conformity...
...3.50), was the grande dame's first novel, written at the insistence of her first husband...
...Mary McCarthy is one of our most accomplished critics of culture and literature, and a talented novelist...
...Another vacation is The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Little, Brown...
...273 pp...
...One function the lurid mass-entertainment and the serious novel have in common is that of purging unmanageable passions by momentarily satisfying them...
...most, and the best, of them are laid in that locale, and they evoke the desert and its people with great clarity and simplicity...
...In Fires on the Plain (Knopf...
...Fear of conformity, which has been ludicrously minimized in a spate of cheap novels like The Durable Fire, has been made the theme of a brilliant book by Ernst Pawel, From the Dark Tower (Macmillan...
...253 pp...
...The same theme, but on a different level, appears in Martin Flavin's Cameron Hill (Harper...
...327 pp...
...307 pp...
...267 pp...
...The hero of From the Dark Tower escapes from the conformism of scientific management by becoming editor of a small town newspaper...
...316 pp...
...245 pp...
...320 pp...
...Graves believes that Dr...
...Written with wit, intelligence, and a fine sense of the dramatic, this is a statement in fiction of many of the ideas of Erich Kahler's latest and unfortunately much neglected inquiry into the broken world of contemporary man, The Tower and the Abyss (George Braziller...
...War fiction, however, can do not only this but much more, as in the strange and terrible tale of human degeneration told by Shohei Ooka, one of Japan's most popular young writers...
...Another, but quite different, "travel book" is Rose Macauley's The Tower of Trebizond (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...tive fusion of travel, history, and literary criticism, as the author tells of his journey through the Italian peninsula, of the history of tradition-laden towns and landscapes, and of the Roman poets identified with them— and ending with an inspired and inspiring evocation of the body and spirit of Rome...
...4.95...
...Morris has a sure eye and ear for "the phony sex, the phony sentiment," for the cliches of language and gesture, for what he calls "slobism," and in this extravagant satire he rephrases in burlesque the themes of his earlier books...
...3.50), in which the murder of a prostitute leads back through the life of the slayer to the origins of his psychic impotence and his inability to accept the conditions of community living in Twentieth Century America...
...277 pp...
...In any event, the good doctor was indeed guilty of much else, and the author is thus able to fill his novel with sex, drink, suicide, dope, and other scandalous matters...
...235 pp...
...344 pp...
...the rest of the book is commonplace, except for the fascinating Suzie, who is at once illiterate and wise, promiscuous and loyal, wanton and innocent, and whose love is convincing because it is portrayed neither sentimentally nor in clinically realistic detail...
...Flavin writes knowledgeably of crime and its motives, especially of the obscure well-springs of perverted passions, without ever resorting to sensationalism for its own sake...
...3.50...
...3.50...
...The cult of Colette has been rewarded with two new volumes from Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
...Palmer was innocent of the particular crime for which he was tried...
...The World of Suzie Wong by Richard Mason (World...
...246 pp...
...William Palmer, who was publicly hanged in 1856 after one of the most notorious trials in British legal history...
...Conrad Richter's is an authentic voice of America and of American literature, and he speaks of our land and people with a love which few other novelists can express so eloquently...
...Briefly Noted After ten novels and a belated National Book Award, Wright Morris has taken a vacation from serious writing with Love Among the Cannibals (Harcourt, Brace...
...Miss Oldenbourg presents poetically and at much length the love of a White Russian refugee and a Catholic daughter of a Jew converted to Catholicism after fleeing Germany, to conclude that "there is loyalty in the world, and life is tragic...
...Several seasons ago Zoe Olden-bourg wrote one of the best of recent historical novels, and now has written one about the post-World War I period, The Awakened (Pantheon 493 pp...
...Finally, John Cheever, that short story writer nonpareil, has written a novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (Harper...
...by turns saccharine and sexy, it suggests the psychological insight and dramatic play of her later, more mature works...
...Another who writes sympathetically and understandingly of the Southwest is Oliver La Farge, sixteen of whose short stories have been collected in A Pause in the Desert (Houghton, Mifflin...
...By contrast, Conrad Richter's The Lady (Knopf...
...The memories and the style alike are cool, dry, brisk, the golden autumn of remembrances of things past...
...Claudine at School (286 pp...
...6.50) is a delightfully entertaining and instruc...
...Close to Colette (245 pp...
...Here the malicious wit of Vile Bodies and some of his other books is mellowed to a whimsical, if sometimes macabjg, humor as he recounts the paranoid delusions of a middle-aged novelist...
...245 pp...
...3.75), begins with a refugee from civilization, a figure compounded of Nansen and Schweitzer, who knows that "in the heart of each of us, each modern man, there dwells a little ancient man," a man of fear and superstition...
...In his search of Africa for an understanding of that little ancient man, he becomes merely that man, and dies a horrible death in a jungle rite of witchcraft...
...Mason has given a fresh turn to the old story of the artist falling in love with a prostitute by placing the story in the Hong Kong of today...
...Elspeth Huxley, in The Red Rock Wilderness (Morrow...
...Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet (Knopf...
...This narrow purpose is the sole justification of such a book as The Unknown Soldier by Vaino Linna (Putnam...
...3.50), a soldier during the Leyte campaign becomes physically exhausted and spiritually confused to the point of eating human flesh...
...Its scenes are among the most harrowing and memorable of Twentieth Century fiction...
...3), is a model of economy, as he relates a tragedy in New Mexico 70 years ago...
...191 pp...
...Actually, one might argue whether these chronicles of a highly individualistic clan of New Englanders really constitute a novel in the formal sense of the word...
...4), a tediously realistic novel about the campaign between Finland and Russia during World War II...
...3.95), sketch the personal heritage of Catholicism from which she has "lapsed," the circumstances of orphanhood and its divisive effects, and the new direction her life took when she went to live with her Jewish grandmother...
...He exhibits that enormous, rambling city with much vividness and vitality...
...but even there falls the shadow of the great city Tower in which he once labored like the underground man of Dos-toevsky...
Vol. 21 • September 1957 • No. 9
