PEARL K. BELL
Fiction Chronicle
THE SECRET HISTORY. By Donna Tartt.
Alfred
A.
Knopf
$23.00.
BEFORE AND AFTER. By Rosellen Brown.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
S21.00.
MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION. By John Updike.
Alfred
A.
Knopf
$23.00.
NATURAL HISTORY. By Maureen Howard.
W. W. Norton and Co.
22.95.
FOLLY. By Susan Minot.
Houghton Mifllin/Seymour Lawrence.
$19.95.
THE ENGLISH PATIENT. By Michael Ondaatje.
Alfred
A.
Knopf
$21.00.
THE PORCUPINE. By Julian Barnes.
Alfred
A.
Knopf
$17.00.
THE CALL OF THE TOAD. By Gunter Grass.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
19.95.
Somewhere in his journals, George Orwell recalls a packet of books he
was once asked to review for a London weekly. One was a novel set in
Indochina, the other a study of eighteenth- century British agriculture,
and in a covering note the editor had written: "These should go well
together." A donnish joke, and probably apocryphal, but the anecdote
comes to mind whenever I must pick and choose for a column about re–
cent fiction. Do the eight novels discussed here "go well together"? Is
there any reason why they should? There is such diversity and variety
among novelists today that any large generalization seems arbitrary and
suspect.
Why were these eight novels selected from the dozens published in
the past few months? Obviously one cannot ignore the recent work of
such established writers as John Updike, Julian Barnes, and Gi.inter Grass,
nor overlook new novels by such lesser but estimable figures as Maureen
Howard, Michael Ondaatje, and Rosellen Brown. Susan Minot pub–
lished a dazzling autobiographical novel,
Monkeys,
in 1986; her new
book,
Folly,
could not be omitted from a discussion of serious fiction.
And then there are meteoric debuts like Donna Tartt's
The Secret
History,
published in a whirlwind of mink-lined hype and money beyond
most writers' wildest dreams of avarice. Since most first novels sink with–
out a trace, and the recession has made publishers wary and stingy, why
was
The Secret History
anointed so lavishly by the gods of literary success
- big-bucks advance, movie rights, six-figure paperback auctions, ecstatic
