BOOKS
REALITIES AND FICTIONS
THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL. By John Cheeller. Harper
&
Bros. $3.00.
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. By Truman Capote. Random House. $3.00.
THE BELL. By Iris Murdoch. Viking. $4.50.
THE LONG DREAM . By Richard Wright. Doubleday. $3 .95.
NIKI. By Tibor Dery. Doubleday. $2.95.
TH E VOYEUR. By Ala in Robbe·GriJlet. Grolle. $1.75.
For a reviewer to make the most of a fiction chronicle, he
should come prepared with a "binding theme" and see to it that the
novels stay bound. I am as ready to play this game as the next man,
but this time the odds are most unfavorable.
Shall the novelists be chastized because they lack values and are
not sufficiently mature? This might seem presumptuous from someone
of my years, since nowadays maturity is the possession of the young.
Find some common technique or idea in the books at hand? Yes; but
how is that to
be
done with a parable about a Hungarian dog, a melo–
drama a:bout Southern Negroes, a batch of
New Yorker
stories, and an
experimental French novel that I probably don't understand?
There seems no choice but to fall back upon a few remarks about
each of the books, treating them independently, as perhaps they should
be treated. While reading them, I did consider the gambit that each
of the writers was responding in his own way to a particular sense of
reality, very different from that of the others, and that consequently
. ... But you will reply that this fact, holding true for all works of fiction,
is hardly enough to distinguish six novels from any other six ; and, alas,
you will be right.
John Cheever is one of the
New Yorker's
most canny and skillful
hands, an expert at regulating the delicate psychic relations between
the magazine and its public. Undeceived as to the troubles of suburbia,
Cheever stands before his readers somewhat like a cautious therapist
making sure the patients don't fly into a rage and tear apart the
modern furniture.
The stories in
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
have a recurrent
pattern. They start with a release of some trouble in the life of a
