BOOKS
707
really .to church that Sarah
(The Erul of the Affair)
,is going and
not to meet her lover.
God
laughs maliciously. On this stage, with
its oddly .clear and yet humanly peculiar themes, with its weary,
engaging purity of design, these brilliant; original works take place,
each one as arresting as the other: Catholic-convert dramas of
sex and renunciation, belief and defiance.
Elizabeth Hardwick
PLOT, CHARACTER, ETC.
TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU. By Kingsley Amis. Horcourt, Broce
&
World. $3.95.
A SEVERED HEAD. By Iris Murdoch. Viking. $3.95.
PRIZE STORIES 1961, THE O. HENRY AWARDS. Edited by Richord
Poirier. Doubledoy. $3 .95.
HEAR US 0 LORD FROM HEAVEN THY DWELLING PLACE. By
Molcolm Lowry. Lippincott. $4.95.
Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch are two of those British
writers who, unlike Americans, turn out novels one after the other
as
if
this were still the nineteenth century. Here they are again
this season. In America they would still be promising young writers
struggling with their souls, unread and half-forgotten after one
success; instead, each of them with five or six books is already
well along toward that Uniform Edition which almost any British
writer can expect to see in his lifetime and which no American
novelist living or dead now has in print. Why is this? Well, perhaps
a narrow answer can say something. These are comic novels, and
so they can use all the old-fashioned machinery of fiction; they
are full of plot, character, setting, and yes, thought and diction,
too. Yet they are not old-fashioned books but very up-to-date, post–
modern in fact, so sophisticated that in their true form each is a
Sort of comment on plot, character, and all that, an homage to the
·novel, like the homage-paintings Paris ·artists used to make after
the masters, part parody, part criticism, and finally, part honest
emUlation of what -is taken to be the permanent and underlying
·prinCiple of the master, riot his ·accident of style or ·subject. Does
·au ·
this· allow thein-and their readers-to keep going?
