The Novel: Very Warm for May

DURING the meetings and drinkings that attended the recent National Book Awards, publishers snarled at agents, editors gloomed or glowed about the book business, some dissident writers got together to demand their rights, including "the right to be cherished."

All the usual reasons for the decline of the novel were chewed over. Pop psychology and sociology have moved onto its turf. The New Journalists, crying Wolfe about America, have stolen its reportorial beat. Readers are spending a lot more time in bed with television. And there are always glum statistics about the high cost and low output of serious quality fiction.

All these points and many others are true. Marketing fiction, more and more, is a matter of big money and high pressure sales, with no guarantee that high-quality, slow-selling products will eventually prove more durable in literature than they do elsewhere in American life. But book lovers need not panic right away. For the late spring has brought as rich and various a collection of fiction (and fact) as anybody has seen in years.

Art v. Life. British, German and Japanese export models are being offered at no extra cost despite the devaluation of the dollar. They include a posthumous Yukio Mishima novel (Runaway Horses), the second volume of a tetralogy that began with Spring Snow; Nobel Prizewinner Heinrich Boell's Group Portrait with Lady, a study of private lives in Nazi Germany; and two of the best books ever done by Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing. In The Black Prince, Murdoch has happily abandoned those platoons of characters for a manageable menage a six (or so). The result is an engaging exercise about art v. life, and a love affair between a man of 58 and a 20-year-old girl that is both preposterous and remarkably touching. Doris Lessing's The Summer Before Dark follows an attractive, greatly troubled woman who in middle age leaves her family for a summer and returns to it by ways which prove again that Lessing is one of the most clear-eyed, humane yet relentless novelists alive.

On native ground Peter De Vries, in Forever Panting, is off again, a touch more vulgar than before, word-playing his way through another marital war. This one includes a husband who develops a yen for his surrogate mother-in-law. John Cheever and Bernard Malamud have collections of short stories, both domestic, the one (The World of Apples) waspish and suburban, the other (Rembrandt's Hat) Jewish and urban. Evan S. Connell Jr., once more roving far from the Bridges of Kansas City, has produced Points for a Compass Rose, a poetic meditation upon the pain and perplexity of life, with instances taken from history and myth.

James Jones has switched from agued realism to a thriller, set in the isles of Greece. "The taxi," Jones' first sentence begins in A Touch of Danger, "roared around the last cloverleaf of a new road and slid in against the high curb like a scared baserunner with his cleats bared." California's Ross Macdonald, who was crowned with olives by New York critics for The Underground Man (1971), has obligingly written his usual highly polished existential mystery once more. This time the title is Sleeping Beauty, and naturally the book hinges on a 25-year-old murder, witnessed by a child. Also from beyond the grave, the fine voice of Poet John Berryman is raised in precise, anguished prose (Recovery), telling about a man's struggles with alcoholism and memories of his father's suicide.

The two biggest literary splashes of the month are likely to follow the launching of two long-awaited novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth. Both are to be published in mid-May. In other ways, too, they seem to be matched and curiously revealing pieces of American fiction (see following reviews). Both are profoundly American in style and subject: Roth's The Great American Novel, a satiric fantasy about a mythical baseball league; Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a surrealist account of a car dealer in the Midwest. Vonnegut is the Erasmus of the black comedians, who feels life as tragedy but tries to see it as a joke that can be ruefully shared. Roth at 40 is some sort of jet-propelled dervish who whirls through literature, demolishing forms, spinning off royalty checks, and leaving everybody (including Roth himself perhaps) to wonder where he will strike next. Both books are funny. Roth's seems compulsive, self-conscious and a bit sophomoric. Vonnegut's shows considerable fatigue and self-indulgence. But it could serve, if necessary, as a satisfying capstone to his career.

If there is a moral here, it may be that--where comedy is concerned --growing up is knowing the joke's on you.

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