BOOKS
FICTION CHRONICLE:
THE WRONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
THE GROVES OF ACADEME. By Mary McCarthy. Harcourt, Bra ce. $3.50
WHO WALK IN DARKNESS. By Chandl er Brossard. New Directions. $2.75
LET IT COME DOWN . By Paul Bowles. Random House. $3 .50
THE WORKS OF LOVE. By Wright Morris. Knopf. $3.00
INVISIBLE MAN. By Ralph Ell ison. Random House. $3 .50
Amid the somewhat arduous labor of reading new novels for
the sake of writing this chronicle, I also read several popular pocket
books, seeking relief and a different perspective. Three of the pocket
books were:
Love's Lovely Counterfeit,
by James M. Cain,
The Tor–
mented,
by Theodore Pratt, and
Crockett's Woman,
by Eric Hatch–
the last has sold more than a million copies. The first is about a
gangster, the second is about a nymphomaniac, and the third about a
"gentleman gangster," and to say that they were trash would be indeed
a very polite euphemism. Yet each of them is readable because they satis–
fy an unavoidable requirement of fiction: they give the reader someone
with whom he can to some degree identify himself. They present the
reader with a hero or heroine and a point of view, which makes it pos–
sible to feel the self-involvement necessary in the experience of fiction, if
only because the reader must forget himself and become absorbed in the
book. It is true that there is very little reason for wanting to involve
and identify oneself with Cain's gangster, Pratt's nymphomaniac, and
Hatch's hero, unless one has nothing better to do with oneself or one
is too tired to do anything more difficult. But the possibility of iden–
tification is the important thing, and it is the neglect of it which makes
many of the serious new novels cultivated exercises in literary or per–
sonal self-indulgence on the part of the author.
These general and perhaps obvious reflections are forced upon
me by some of the novels under review, and particularly by Miss
Mary McCarthy's new book: everyone in her book is either ridiculous,
stupid, vicious, or silly. But if this is really true, the reason for read–
ing novels as well as for writing them disappears (and an epitome
of this hopeless conclusion is the fact that one of the most ridiculous
affectations in
The Groves Of Academe
is a fondness for the works
of James Joyce). It is also true that there is a certain state of the
mind and the heart when the reader feels so unworthy, so hopeless
