Our Young Comic Novelists

...He has a churlish attitude towards things foreign which is rather tonic in these days of respect-bordering-on-awe for the customs of other lands...

...But these are minor matters...

...In the end he is driven to the unpardonable sin of demonstrating his humanity and is himself sent off to Auschewitz...

...His "Sentimental Education" seems to me a definitive statement on young love as practiced these days in our colleges, and his stories about the maturing of a woman named Laurie offer stunning insights into that group of citizens who have been pretty much ignored by our writers—the Americans in their late twenties who are just starting down the pike to suburbia...

...245 pp...

...It must not be inferred from the foregoing that all the stories in the collection are failures...

...It had seemed that De Vries and Amis might pick up the banner where the two older Englishmen dropped it in their varied nights toward differing mysticisms...

...It is a passionate book, a tale of young love, of the growing up and the death of a young man, and of the death of a family which is possibly, if Mr...

...They lack the humor which arises out of solid characterization and an awareness of the deeper human absurdities out of which true comedy must rise...

...Kerouac's book is almost totally devoid of syntax or of meaning to a wider group than the beat boys...

...To be sure, the Book of the Month Club is forever selecting allegedly funny novels, but most of them, like Don't Go Near the Water and Say, Darling, are curiously flat works—souffles that refuse to rise...

...1.45...

...Knopf will allow me to say so, just a teensy bit neurotic, but still wonderfully vital in its loves and hatreds...

...Furthermore, it is infinitely silly, unworthy of consideration by anyone who isn't on tea or benny himself, and, unintentionally, the funniest book I have read in a long time...

...3.75) and in it he again deals with a lower middle-class English intellectual...

...3.75) is about pre-marital misbehavior, but it comes to the same thing, for the chief misbehaver is a man who is too recently a widower to be gadding about...

...So is "The Growing Stone," which is about an act of brotherhood that takes place in a Brazilian jungle and is Conradian in tone...

...But he tells a swell story, one that will, as they say "keep you glued to your chair well after bedtime...

...It may seem a trifle frivolous to juxtapose with the latest work of the Nobel Laureate a first collection of stories by a young writer...

...The book's basic situation is promising...

...A book which seemed to me extremely sick is Shirley Jackson's latest, The Sundial (Farrar, Straus and Cud-ahy...

...But the sad fact is that De Vries and Amis seem to be in a bit of a rut...

...It is the sort of book that will make a fine movie (that is not said in a nasty tone at all) and which is exciting escape reading, if not quite the "major novel" its publishers claim...

...3.95) is a splendid book in the Southern tradition of Robert Penn Warren...

...3.50) is a disappointment...

...It is about a man who voluntarily enters one of the camps in order to become one of the handful of Jews in charge of selecting other Jews for the gas chambers of Auschewitz...

...Brodkey is a teller of stories...

...It is all about a love affair between two very hip characters who are members of the beat generation, a sub-group in our society which Kerouac describes this way: "They are hip without being slick, they are intelligent without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike...

...208 pp...

...There are some fine hunting scenes in the book which set the stage for a climax that is almost Elizabethan in its bloodiness...

...So the book remains merely interesting...

...What, then, is the matter...

...223 pp...

...The matter is that Amis has nothing new to say...

...But it tells only a partial truth (otherwise known as a half-lie) about men and man...

...2.50) is also a book about sickness—but it is based on the most horrible truth of our times, the Nazi concentration camps...

...He has been over it before, and with better results, in The Stranger and The Plague...

...The book has a simple message about bravery: that it is not a thing of the moment but rather consists of living with yourself and your weaknesses all your life...

...Indeed, "The Guest," which is about a schoolteacher who is asked to turn a murderer over to the authorities and does not, is a fine story by any standards...

...What Camus is attempting in these stories is to deduce human behavior from his own philosophical premises...

...Miss Jackson dredges quite a bit of graveyard humor out of the situation, and on the last page there is every reason to suspect that the world is really coming to a halt...

...The important thing about Brodkey's work is that it is fresh and unpretentious...

...It is an extremely feminine book, containing the sort of insights your wife has when she is picking on you—true, to a point, but maddening in their meanness of spirit...

...And that is the real horror of the story—that this bunch will be in charge of propagating the race...

...92 pp...

...Its jacket states that Home From the Hill is a book in which "passionate people are driven to action, to violence and finally to destruction by their passions—and not by mere neuroses...

...He has thus abandoned the traditional method of the writer of fiction who induces, and presents by indirection, larger meanings from the actions of individual characters...

...3.50) seems in order...

...And all the stories are interesting, for Camus remains one of the most original of modern minds—the man who has seen most deeply into the soul of Twentieth Century man...

...This leads only to coterie success, of course, and I think Amis is better than that...

...In his case the place is commuting Connecticut...

...He is not a novelist by trade and he does not communicate the real mental agony which a man in the position of his hero must have suffered...

...it must have not only a story, but a tightly constructed one or the whole edifice will collapse...

...It is about a cowardly major assigned to conduct five winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor and a woman accused of treason to a base in the area of the army General Pershing commanded in Mexico against the Villistas in 1916...

...The majority of the pieces in Exile might properly be termed allegories rather than short stories...

...It is well enough written, and if you take the occupants of the house as symbolic of the human race awaiting atomic destruction, perhaps it has something to say about our world and our admittedly neurotic times...

...There are some technical complaints which must be raised about Home from the Hill...

...Like Amis, Peter De Vries is a literate young man—something which sets him apart from the other young American comic novelists—but he too has lingered too long in one place...

...he has put together a first-rate collection of stories...

...In the process, comedy of ideas and characterization gives way to fairly broad farce that is not very funny and is even a trifle tasteless...

...It will be interesting to see what Amis and De Vries do in their next works...

...The book is Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans (Grove Press...

...But it seems to me that Harold Brodkey, who makes absolutely no pretense of being a philosopher, has, in his First Love and Other Sorrows (Dial...

...He wrote it, so a press release tells me, "on one long continuous teletype roll, typing at night by candlelight...

...He is equally good when working the most overworked fictional vein of our times—adolescence...

...213 pp...

...Strictly speaking, his new book, The Mackerel Plaza (Little, Brown...

...Swarthout, incidentally, has a nice, clean prose style...

...3.50), succeeded where Camus failed...

...Certainly they don't have the philosophical importance of Camus' works, but they are nice examples of an ancient and honorable art...

...213 pp...

...They are still the best hopes of a tradition which is deteriorating rapidly into the crassest sort of commercialism...

...This is particularly true of Amis...

...Mostly, they seek but do not find...

...What is most disturbing is that the ground covered in this collection is largely familiar ground for Camus...

...It is just possible that Amis is on the brink of following P. G. Wodehouse (to whom, plots and settings and characters aside, his style owes quite a bit) down the primrose path of self-plagar-ism...

...260 pp...

...Yes—oh, dear, yes:—the novel tells a story," E. M. Forster once remarked a little sadly when discussing the theory of the novel...

...It also gives De Vries a chance to get his comedy on a slightly more cerebral plane than previously...

...Swarthout misses some opportunities for characterizing his motley band as they proceed on their arduous journey which ends in a hero's death for the major...

...Briefly Noted The new collection of short stories by Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom (Knopf...

...With William Styron, he seems to me the most promising—and the most mentally healthy—young Southern novelist...

...there is a moderately disconcerting shifting from viewpoint to viewpoint (first person narration to third person narration and back again), and there are some horrid cliches which creep now and then into the usually neat prose...

...Humphrey has a tidy way with a symbol, can draw lively, three-dimensional characters, and can tell a story like nobody's business...

...The fellow is taking his little family to Portugal for a combined vacation and literary sleuthing expedition...

...The major, in the course of incredible hardships, proves to be the only really brave man in the lot...

...the characters in them are moved less by human motivations than by the author's attempts to score philosophical points...

...As was true in The Fall (which was originally intended as a part of this collection), the philosopher has got the better of the fiction writer...

...No matter whether he says it badly or well— and he is entitled even to such abject failures as the story "The Artist at Work"—what he has to say is important to all of us...

...He said it all before in Lucky Jim, the first novel which remains his masterpiece (and perhaps the funniest book written since the war) and repeated it again in That Uncertain Feeling...

...Unfortunately, in his small compass Presser, who himself survived a death camp, cannot do justice to his theme...

...If you know anything at all about the process of writing, that statement is all ye need know about Kerouac and his latest effort...

...It is hard to say why The Sundial is such an irritating book...

...But J Like It Here has a woefully wobbly story line, a thing of rags and patches...

...It contains fine flashes of wit, and I'm sure any number of humorists would give their gag files to have written it, but the truth is Amis can do better than this short and—for him—shoddy work which has the air about it of having been dashed off at the insistence of a publisher...

...Ill pp...

...So setting and situation are traditional De Vries...

...The very fact that they are both "young" and "comic" sets them in a class somewhat apart, for there are few youthful comedians writing novels these days...

...And they are too young and too bright to get mired in those ruts of self-imitation which are the biggest dangers to humorists who choose to work in the peculiar form which is perhaps the most difficult of fiction's many mansions—the truly comic novel...

...Both of those books had solid, tightly constructed plots...

...Finally, a brief mention of Glendon Swarthout's They Came to Cordura (Random House...

...312 pp...

...3.75...

...That about sums up the book's virtues...

...Another young writer who has treated his readers well is William Humphrey, whose Home From the Hill (Knopf...

...But De Vries, again like Amis, has plot trouble...

...Amis might have repeated himself and still vastly amused someone not familiar with his previous works, had he done a proper piece of plotting...

...It is part of the vision that these people will be the sole survivors of the cataclysm...

...This is all to the good, and it represents, I believe, real growth on the part of the writer...

...A collection of Real Sick Ones are gathered in a big old house awaiting the end of the world—a vision of which has been communicated to one of their number...

...That statement goes,double for the comic novel...

...They lack, also, the sort of verbal fireworks that one associates with fine comic writing of the sort practiced by Huxley and Waugh...

...Once again Amis makes masterly use of the inappropriate cliche, which is as much his trademark as it is Perleman's...

...The common theme of these stories is the isolation of individuals ("exiles") and their attempts to overcome that isolation and thus find "the kingdom" of spiritual rebirth...

...I refrain from mentioning their utter lack of resemblance to Christ...

...It might be added, since that is enough of Kerouac's prose for a reasonable person to take at one sitting, that they take dope and are, judging from Kerouac's writing about them, corny, unbright, and pretentious...

...What is different is that the hero in this case is an ultramodern minister of the gospel...

...Basically they are but strings of gags strung along a slightly sagging story line...

...His latest is called / Like It Here (Harcourt, Brace...

...This gives De Vries a chance to have some good, clean fun with theology, an area of human endeavor which, for the life of me, I can't understand why someone hasn't kidded a little before this...

...Again his principal character stands a bit outside the prevailing attitudes of his society—the ideal position for comic commentary...

...Let us look, for a moment, at yet a third book which deals with mental sickness...

...He is a devotee of the comedy of marital misbehavior and is quite expert at it...

...He does it supremely well, without any of the trickery that has overtaken the older members of the New Yorker group (like John Cheever and Robert Coates) to which he belongs...

...In a sense this is a novel based on the age old theme of selling your soul to the devil...

...It is a fraud...

...The ending seems curiously forced and a little slap-dash—as if he suddenly tired of his characters and decided to polish them off in the quickest possible way...

...Jacob Presser's Breaking Point (World...