Reviving the Story-Telling Art

After a long depression, making believe is paying off

In America, fiction is always in trouble. The novel has been receiving extreme unction for 20 years, the short story is the waif of literature, perennially searching for a home. Yet this fall, scores of worthy novels have issued from distinguished publishers; stories still find a loyal readership. Random House Editorial Director Jason Epstein notes that James Michener's novel Chesapeake is selling twice as well as his last one. A first novel, Final Payments by Mary Gordon, has sold 40,000 copies. Says Epstein: The outlook for U.S. fiction has "never been better. "

Richard Snyder, president of Simon & Schuster, agrees: "Anyone who decries the state of fiction is naive. It used to be that the maximum you could hope to sell in quality work was about 100,000 copies. That figure has doubled in recent years. "

Herman Gollob, editor in chief of Atheneum, admits that "there is one kind of fiction that is disappearing -- the non-friction novel that gives off no sparks, that is selfconscious, competent, tedious. But the rest of the list has unprecedented vitality and variety. If you can get Judith Krantz's Scruples and John Irving's The World According to Garp on the same bestseller list, you have a thriving democratic literature. " It is a literature that will always experience depressions as well as rallies. But for now, most publishers of novels and stories are bullish on fiction. As this autumn gathering proves, they have at least 11 good reasons:

ADJACENT LIVES by Ellen Schwamm Knopf; 215 pages; $7.95

A distinguished art critic, Tom is weary of his marriage to his promiscuous, desperately chic wife, and finds in his beautiful student a kind of Beatrice to his Dante. Although she is happily married, Natalie is immediately attracted to her professor's radiance of mind. He pursues her, she capitulates only too willingly, and they begin a year-long series of passionate, clandestine meetings. In her first novel, Ellen Schwamm takes this conventional plot and Manhattan milieu and creates a fresh and elegant narrative.

As Natalie endures two deaths in the family and Tom tries to come to terms with his wife's infidelities, their affair frays and then severs. Though the doomed lovers are portrayed with grace and wit, the novel's style is curiously oblique, conveying intensity of feeling not so much by exposition as by choice of detail and inflection.

"Even her passion has poise," Schwamm writes of Natalie. The same may be said of Schwamm's minor-key prose, remarkably suited to evoking those "moments of clear, bright, sufficient joy" that elevate life and redeem grief.

A KINGDOM by James Hanley Horizon; 201 pages; $8.95

The Welsh novels of James Hanley are peopled by a nation of poets. An old man recites a story in a pub and "the sun came out of his mouth"; the storyteller's auditor reports to his wife: "That Roberts man broke open his tight mouth and warmed the whole place with a tale."

But those tales are generally somber, despite their lyrical intensity. Hanley's novels, which have enjoyed a considerable reputation in England since the 1930s, exude a chill that corresponds to the spare, cramped lives of his characters: a bardic policeman who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a tramp from his village, a spinster who lives with her father on a remote farm. It is a landscape out of Hardy, but with none of Hardy's ruminative asides; a master of idiom and intonation, Hanley relies on dialogue to disclose character. His prose reads like a play.

A Kingdom relates the tense encounter between two sisters on the occasion of their father's death. One had chosen a total allegiance to the old man, the other a marriage that enabled her to escape the family's terrible isolation. Hanley's suggestive style evokes by its very reticence the buried motives and subtle emotions that impose themselves on every human act. "I like to work out in my mind how far a word will go, how deep, or how high it can climb," meditates one of his characters. In Hanley's luminous novels, words travel about as far as they can go in the direction of music.

NEGLECTED LIVES by Stephen Alter Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 179 pages; $8.95

Haifa century ago, E.M. Forster raised questions about British colonialism in A Passage to India. Novelists have been answering ever since. One of the most unusual replies is this brief visit to a colony of Anglo-Indians in Debrakot, a forgotten hill town where the conflict of blood and tradition provides new wounds every day.

Brigadier Theodore Augden recalls his years of military service: "The few of us who were called Eurasians first and officers afterwards were looked on by _ the Brits as upstarts. The Indians called us snobs." Strangers in their own skins, exiles in their own country, the half-castes yearn for some homeland that does not exist. Enter " Lionel, 20, banished from Lucknow because of an affair with a Hindu girl. The young bachelor withdraws into lofty isolation. "He was laughing at us for our old ways, our old clothes, our games, our silly picnics, and our drunkenness," thinks Natalie, Augden's wife, as she watches Lionel keeping his distance. But Lionel is the one who confronts the pains of mixed heritage. "It's the world of alleys and narrow lanes I'm scared of," he confesses, "anything outside the garden wall." In time he comes to sympathize with the vision of India's lost generation: "We are all refugees escaping from our tradition and yet, at the same time, carrying it on our backs."

Occasionally, Alter grows so sensitive that he is practically inaudible, and some of his insights are a bit unripe. But his cast is indelible and his command of narrative assured. The handful of flaws can be easily overlooked. For the author, who grew up in India, the son of American missionaries, is all of 22. His first novel marks the debut of an artist worth reading and watching closely.

BLACK CAMELOT by Duncan Kyle St. Martin's Press; 277pages; $8.95

Duncan Kyle writes thinking man's thrillers (The Suvarov Adventure, Whiteout!) that invariably become bestsellers in Britain, and for good reason: they combine all too human characters, masterly plotting and impeccable research. Black Camelot is all Kyle guile. The novel is set in the waning months of World War II, when the Third Reich's slimier survivors are engaged in a last-ditch struggle.

The Nazis' scheme is to smuggle to the Soviets lists of Britons who have supported the German war effort. Their hope is to inflame Stalin's deep distrust of his allies. The plan goes agley when the documents, hand-carried to Sweden, are used instead to blackmail English industrialists.

Kyle's antihero is 35-year-old Hauptsturmfuehrer Franz Rasch, a much decorated Waffen SS commando. Assigned to deliver the lists in Stockholm, he is betrayed by his bosses. His trail leads to neutral Ireland and England and finally back to Germany. There the disillusioned Rasch attempts to capture vital files from Schloss Wewelsburg, the Black Camelot that Himmler assembled as a Teutonic perversion of King Arthur's court. In one of the best siege narratives since The Guns of Navarone, Rasch and other embittered SS men infiltrate the monstrous castle at the same time that it is being destroyed on Himmler's orders.

Happy endings are not the Kyle style. But time is a great provider. Today, the author informs us, the castle has been reconstructed as a youth hostel. Such truths are comforting; but it is fiction like Black Camelot that makes history live.

SECRET ISAAC by Jerome Charyn Arbor House; 315 pages; $9.95

Jerome Charyn exerts energies that could make a turbine envious. At 41 he has published his twelfth novel, an adrenal tour of Manhattan, Dublin and parts unknown. The title character is a grief-racked, unshaven drifter who caroms around in search of trouble. The quest is professional: Isaac Sidel is first deputy police commissioner, a plainclothesman eaten by dreams and ravaged by a tape worm fastened to his entrails.

Deep in middle age, Isaac has suddenly acquired the wisdom of a sage and the passions of a schoolboy. In his rag picker's guise he becomes smitten with Annie Powell, a beautiful hooker disfigured by a D-shaped scar carved in her cheek.

The scarlet letter was placed there by her crooked Irish lover, Dermott Bride. Isaac's tale of jealousy and vengeance is a simple one, diverted by the author's irrepressible gusto: in New York, a woman's eyes turn "a green that was so fierce, Isaac had to grab the wall." In Ireland, the sky is so dark, "the elves must have put a roof on Cashel Hill." Shouts of murderers and comedians sound across the Hudson and Liffey rivers. Episodes in Nighttown and the underworld consciously echo the rhythms of James Joyce and Saul Bellow, but Charyn manages to sustain his own peculiar tone, a unique amalgam of psychological insight and scatological farce. It is one of the most unlikely and compeling literary combinations since T.S. Eliot's Gerontion mixed garlic and sapphires in the mud.

FIELDS OF FIRE by James Webb Prentice Hall; 344 pages; $9.95

Haifa dozen years ago, some critics predicted that no good literature would emerge from Viet Nam. The literate men of the generation were in college, or jail, or Canada, said the theory. And yet an able and even distinguished body of war memoirs and novels has been steadily accumulating: Ronald Glasser's 365 Days, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, Michael Herr's eloquent Dispatches.

Among the best fiction is James Webb's Fields of Fire. Now a counsel to the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Webb was a company commander in Viet Nam--wounded twice, decorated with the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars. His story, about a platoon of Marines hacking through the bush around An Hoa, lacks the zonked frenzy of some Viet Nam prose. But Webb is a shrewd storyteller who seems to have gone through the Nam with a cassette recorder in his inner ear. Snake, a street-tough "grunt," hears the standard, "Where are you from?" Says Snake, with exactly the right tone: "I ain't from anywhere, Lieutenant. It's me and Mother Green, the Killing Machine. Till death do us part."

Webb's book has the unmistakable sound of truth acquired the hard way. His men hate the war; it is lethal fact cut adrift from personal sense. Yet they understand that its profound insanity, its blood and oblivion, have in some way made them fall in love with battle and with one another. Back in "the World," they would never again be so incandescently alive. The point is as old as Homer, of course, but Webb restates it with merciless precision.

THE SEA, THE SEA by Iris Murdoch Viking; 5 12 pages; $10.95

In her 19th novel, Iris Murdoch serves her familiar potpourri--a bit of suspense, a hint of the supernatural, some philosophical musings on truth and art, and Walpurgisnachtian drama, here centered on romantic obsession. Director-Playwright-Cad Charles Arrowby, 60, retires from the London theater to Shruff End, an isolated house on a small rocky promontory. There he expects to find the tranquillity required to transform his diary into autobiography. Destiny has other plans. Lizzie and Rosina, his past mistresses, appear from nowhere to fill the air with recriminations. Arrowby excuses his past indiscretions by invoking the sacred memory of Hartley, a childhood sweetheart who fled just when they were old enough to marry. Hartley appears almost immediately in the nearby village, and her old lover sets out to reclaim her. The author renders her immorality play with painstaking attention to atmosphere: the changing hues of the waves, the slippery amber rocks, the strangely damp house are all made palpable. The old scandals are shrewdly reexamined, and Murdoch's style is as saline as the sea below. Still she remains better at surfaces than at sounding depths. Charles' journey through an emotional purgatory is curiously detached, as if the author were writing a tour guide to hell. Judging from Charles' crowded hours, visitors had better book in advance.

IT WAS A WONDERFUL SUMMER FOR RUNNING AWAY by Charles N. Barnard Dodd, Mead; 216 pages; $8.95

Charles is a list maker, the kind of kid who cannot be happy unless he writes the reasons why. But this is 1936, a year to be miserable. So he notes five motives for cutting out. The last is the saddest: "Because I'll 'never grow up as long as I'm here where everybody thinks I'm just a kid " Everyone is right. He is just a kid, a fatherless adolescent who already bears scars of the Depression and its aftermath. The boy's New England home town is as stifling as the air in his room, and his mother is too full of mourning to understand the boy's urges. Frustration clings to his plans like moss to a sapling.

With Charles, as with his antecedents Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, flight is a notion, not a goal; all paths lead inescapably to man's estate. First Novelist Barnard, a travel writer, gives this familiar story a freshness by locating it in a simpler era. In 1936 summer is defined as the time between haircuts; National Geographic and Lowell Thomas provide the few glimpses of the outside world; Hudson sedans and the St. Louis Browns are assumed to be permanent components of the American scene; history is close enough to scorch the earth, yet the insular town can only hear its own heartbeat. Today, when adolescence is armed with purchasing power and microscopically examined for tendencies, Wonderful Summer has the aura-- and the value--of an antique. For as riders of those Hudsons knew, the view from a good rearview mirror can be as revealing as the one from a windshield.

THE SUICIDE'S WIFE by David Madden Bobbs-Merrill; 185 pages; $8.95

Four years ago, David Madden published Bijou, a luxurious novel of adolescent sexual torment that never received the critical attention it deserved. That novel was laden with incident and feeling, thick with nostalgia for a vanished small-town South; The Suicide's Wife is laconic and thin. A failed academic poet commits suicide (Madden offers examples of his work, which provide a clue), and his bland, colorless wife discovers that her existence is unfathomable in his absence. Haunted by her husband's apparently motiveless death, unnerved by her three children's importunate curiosity about their father, she struggles to rekindle his image in her mind-- and to create a personality for herself.

The Suicide's Wife is a study in passivity; Madden has managed to portray from within the sensation of nothingness that manifests itself in a concentration upon objects, an obsession with the texture of things. His novel is an American version of Sartre's Nausea: a definitive portrait of depression. As such, The Suicide's Wife is masterly; but the author's note promises that his work in progress, Pleasure-Dome, will be a sequel to Bijou -reassuring news to readers familiar with that richly evocative book.

WRINKLES by Charles Simmons Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $8.95

In the era of the facelift, Charles Simmons' third novel, Wrinkles, is a reminder that age withers and custom stales, that love, children and work are procrastinations before getting down to the serious business of dying.

This tale of a minor novelist from cradle to edge of grave is constructed from short chapters that overlap time like pleats. Each chapter is also a minibiography that advances the novel's nameless protagonist through the stages and principal themes of his life: the confusions of parental and brotherly love and sex, lapsed Catholicism and sex, failed marriage and sex, friends and sex, thwarted career and sex, money and sex.

The prose style is as laconic as an investigator's dossier. Yet each page glistens with details of growth and change that readers should find familiar though freshly perceived. Simmons notes, for example, that his character is put off by certain signs of age, particularly "a looseness around the eyes so that they do not. express his moods."

Throughout, the writer's mood reflects a stoicism warmed to body temperature by an irrepressible sense of romance and self-amusement: "As he gets older, he will sometimes try to inquire into his deepest wishes, hoping to find a weariness with life that would make death less fearsome, but can't." In a secular age, that is Simmons' deceptive and effective way of saying grace.

EYE OF THE NEEDLE by Ken Follett Arbor House; 313 pages; $8.95

Ken Follett's novel has a simple purpose deftly carried out: it is a crackling good yarn. The Needle is die Nadel, code name for a Nazi agent in World War II Britain. He loathes his sobriquet because--violating a rule of code names--it carries meaning as well as identification. He dispatches his victims with a stiletto thrust upward into the heart. Die Nadel happens upon a secret of great import: the truth that the Allies will attack at Normandy, not at Calais.

While die Nadel (real name: Henry Faber) scurries to get his information out of the country and into German hands, British intelligence closes in. The ultimate battle is played out on Storm Island, bleak outcropping of rock in the North Sea. There, escaping from Aberdeen in a fishing boat, Faber is shipwrecked. Between him and a rendezvous with a U-boat stand the island's four occupants: a shepherd, an ex-R.A.F. pilot who has lost his legs, and the amputee's wife and child. Faber stalks them.

Follett's plotting is crisp, but it does not get in the way of his people--nicely crafted, three-dimensional figures who linger in the memory long after the circumstances blur. The final fadeout, in a teatime epilogue years later, is for that reason eminently satisfying and, for a sometimes brutal novel, touched with just the right note of tenderness.

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