BOOKS
609
FOOLS is a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection. SHIP OF FOOLS
has been compared to the best novels of the past hundred years by
Mark Schorer in the
N.Y. Times Book Review.
SHIP OF FOOLS has
been featured on the front pages of every literary publication in
America."
Still, it might be wrong for those of us who read what maybe
are not literary publications, or not American, or don't have front
pages, to yield too swiftly to the urge of denial. It is true that the
manner of this novel is as different from the manner of the stories as
the two kinds of public reception have been. But the novel is clearly
not aimed at the response that has greeted it; it has nothing in common
with a confection like
To
Kill
a
Mockingbird
except that the contents
of both have been misrepresented to their purchasers. In this con–
fusion of cause and event, and setting aside the inevitable disappoint–
ment of a book that was rather famously being written for twenty
years, it may be best to declare at once that
Ship of Fools
is a good
book, or, as we say,
"not
a bad book really." It is better, by most
standards, than any best seller since
Dr. -?,1vivago;
of the order, prob–
ably, of Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy. It is something better than al–
most anyone else is doing now, clearly the work of an interesting mind
and an accomplished hand ; and yet limited, too, clearly not a great
novel, neither central
in
the power of its view of life nor crucial in the
literature of fiction. The publishing phenomena do not matter. This
may well be one of those cases in which, as a wise friend remarked,
"They decided to let her have this success, after all," and probably
before
they
had read it. The men of the book business and their
publicists do this from time to time with real writers, do it, for one
reason, in order to keep up their pretense of having something to do
with literature, much as the
N.Y. Times Book Review
prints here and
there among its puffs something by some ensnared reputable critic.
The odd thing about the reviews I have seen, both the favorable
ones in the big "literary publications" and the unfavorable ones in some
of the little magazines, has been the reviewers' small interest in saying
much about the real tone, the intention, the manner and meaning, of
the book.
Here I am not referring either to the question of whether the
book is, phrase for phrase, "well-written," or to the question of its
supposed allegorical depths. As for the "writing," the language is
clear, direct, un-mannered, and quite sufficiently well-spoken in the
dialect of modern expository and narrative prose. Allegory at best can
provide nothing but a framework for incidents and observations that
