BOOKS
THE NOVEL IN TH E POST-POLITICAL WORLD
A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE. By Nelson Algren. Forrer, Straus and
Cudahy. $4.50.
A SINGLE PEBBLE. By John Hersey. Alfred A. Knopf. $3.00.
THE LONG VIEW. By Elizabeth Jane Howard. Reynal. $3.75.
THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER. By Iris Murdoch. Viking. $3.75.
To read a group of novels is these days a depressing experi–
ence. At least, it is so for me; after the fourth or fifth, I find myself
beginning to think about "The Novel," and I feel a desperate desire
to sneak out to a movie. How respectable the form has become, how
predictable! It is hard to remember that only two hundred years ago
reading novels was a secret vice of young girls, and writing them the
occupation of shameless hacks who would be nowadays, I suppose, in
the comic book business. Anyone with literary pretensions felt obliged
then to pretend he was perpetrating a hoax or undertaking a parody
when he turned to that outlaw form. Perhaps, a law against the pub–
lishing of novels might even yet give the genre new life; and even the
passing of resolutions condemning it by the PTA's of several states
would help.
As it is, the consumption of novels has become a dull public ob–
servance like going to church. It
is
going to church, the last gesture of
piety to art on the part of the bourgeoisie who once fought so bitterly
to claim this aspect of culture as their birthright. And yet, prose fiction
is the only common literature of our world; the drama belongs by and
large to the inhabitants of a few big cities, or more precisely, perhaps,
to the visitors from the hinterland to those cities; while reading serious
poetry becomes the eccentric occupation of teachers and old survivors.
To "read a book" is for us almost exclusively to read a novel; literature,
if it is anything, is quite simply the novel. The sense of this imposes
upon the writer of fiction an almost overwhelming burden: the obliga–
tion at once to satisfy and baffle this last surviving hunger for the
imaginative experience in words.
We grew up, the readers and writers of my generation, at the end
of a desperate attempt to redeem the novel from success and the
