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University Daily Kansan Thursday, March 26,1964
China, Italy, Mexico Offer Settings for Novels
THE SAND PEBBLES, by Richard McKenna (Crest, 95 cents).
An epic tale of high adventure that won the $10,000 Harper Prize and stayed high on the best-seller lists for half a year is now in paperback. It is exciting, but not only that, for it is meaningful. Some critics compared it to "The Caine Mutiny." It is a better book, and it has considerably more scope.
"The Sand Pebbles" is about a gunboat that cruises on a tributary of the Yangtze River in the province of Hunan, and its central character is a machinist named Jake Holman. The boat is the San Pablo, captured from the Spanish in '98, largely manned by ill-paid Chinese coolies, with the Americans mostly trying to have a good time on shore and take in the river towns.
Then comes the Chinese revolution, and onto the stage steps even the famous Chiang Kai-shek. Comes a mutiny, and action leading to the climax.
THE MAGNIFICENT BASTARDS, by L. Herndon Crockett (Dell, 75 cents).
A reprinting of a war novel that has been kicking around since 1954, and which you may have seen in a movie called "The Proud and Profane," with William Holden and Deborah Kerr. It's about a big tough marine raider and the mean wav he treats a lovely lady. All told, a reasonably good war story
RAPBIT, RUN, by John Updike (Crest, 60 cents); PIGEON FEATHERS, AND OTHER STORIES, by John Undike (Crest, 50 cents); THE SAME DOOR, by John Updike (Crest, 50 cents);
THE CENTAUR, by John Updike (Crest, 60 cents); THE POORHOUSE FAIR, by John Updike (Crest, 50 cents).
As you can see, Crest is publishing John Updike. In this time of writers of not particularly commanding talent this man looks good. The trouble is, he hasn't really written a first-class book yet, even though each of these has the touches of excellence.
Three of these are novels; two are collections of short stories, these being "The Same Door" and "Pigeon Feathers, etc." The short stories especially reveal Udlike as a man of style, beautiful metaphors, sharp phrases, excellent description. What bothers one is the feeling that the stories are relatively insignificant, like a story called "The Crow in the Weeds" that moves from a young man's excitement at the beauty of a winter morning to his wife's rapid bringing him back down to earth.
But these are still vignettes of living. The student of creative writing should know them, even though the student of explicit sexual description may know more about them. For Updike, though his work is not pornography, does have quite a feeling for the juicy episode. This quality underscores "Rabbit, Run," a story of frustration, about a one-time great basketball star (in high school), his bitter marriage, his adventure with a prostitute, his inability to come to grips with life. "The Poorhouse Fair" is a novel, too, short and exhibiting Updike's understanding of his society.
"The Centaur" has certain pretensions, starting right with its title, continuing with a quotation from Karl Barth on its title page. We get the modernized myth of Chiron, the centaur who sacrifices immortality as an atement for Prometheus. This kind of thing goes on and on, and symbolism runs rampant, as it should in any book likely to find itself on a reading list these days.
The novel itself as a portrait of a school-teacher, his son and their relationship. It is a book, frequently eloquent, that never quite makes it.
GIOVANNI'S ROOM, by James Baldwin (Dell. 60 cents).
This one goes back almost a decade, after "Go Tell It on the Mountain" but before "Another Country." If your taste runs to "Another Country" this is your book. It seems almost a foreshadowing, though it is far shorter.
James Baldwin is a troubling writer, one of real insights and understanding but also addicted to the cheap and the sensational. You have to accept, it seems, the beauty and the glory of the homosexual relationship. There is some of this, and also of the relationship between man and woman.
If you want to know about Baldwin as racial spokesman this, by the way, is not the book. Read his essays, or read "Go Tell It on the Mountain."
DAUIGHTER OF SILENCE, by Morris L. West (Dell, 60 cents).
Morris L. West has moved high among contemporary writers with his absorbing, meaningful novels, "The Devil's Advocate" and "The Shoes of the Fisherman." This is an interesting and well-written novel of 1961 which also has received high praise.
Like "The Devil's Advocate" it is set in Italy, and it deals with the trial of a young girl in a vendetta murder. The backgrounds, mood, plot are all believable. And like the other West books there is considerable understanding of human motivation, of good and evil. West is a thoughtful writer who deserves the position he has received in current literature.
THE BRAVE BULLS, by Tom Lea
(Little, Brown. $1.95).
Besides being an excellent writer, Tom Lea dogs beautiful illustrations. The text and the illustrations, in combination, make "The Brave Bulls" a paperback buy selldom equaled.
Readers may have encountered this novel more than a decade ago,
or may have seen it in Robert Rossen's fine motion picture. This is a story of bull-fighting, particularly of Louis Bello, "the swordsman of Guerrerae." It is a story of the bull ring, and the breeding farms.
Most especially it is a story of fear. Seldom does one encounter a novel which conveys so well the mind of the craftsman of the bull ring; one recalls it from Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon," his short stories, or some of the episodes in "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
ALSO THE HILLS, by Frances Parkinson Keyes (Crest, 95 cents).
The ladies have a big old blockbuster ahead of them that will work them through many handkerchiefs. Frances Parkinson Keyes has given them some of their teariest moments, and "Also the Hills" is calculated to brighten many days with its sentiment.
It is a story of love and marriage in a New England family, and also a story of war.
THE CARDINAL, by Henry Morton Robinson (Cardinal, 75 cents).
This novel is due for a lot more mileage, because it has been made into a blockbuster movie by Otto Preminger, and the publishers have given the book a movie tie-in.
It's worth some mileage, for, though not a great novel, it is a good one. First published in 1950, it deals with an American priest, Stephen Fermoyle, who becomes a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Then unfolds a dramatic tale of considerable excitement and incident.
Here, in a novel of 1961, are the literary tricks but little of the message that made for great John Dos Passos a quarter of a century ago. Yet the book is still better than
MID-CENTURY, by John Dos Passos (Cardinal. 75 cents).
most of what this once-gifted writer has given us since "Adventures of a Young Man" and "Number One."
The Camera Eye and Newsreel tricks that marked "U.S.A." become the "Documentary" in "Mid-Century." And Dos Passos gives us portraits of contemporary figures as he tells his fictional tale.
We get, for examples, two Deans, the film star James and the General William. There also are Eleanor Roosevelt, LaFollette, and John L. Lewis, among others.
THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST, by Conrad Richter (Bantam Pathfinder. 40 cents).
"The Light in the Forest" has assumed almost the proportions of a modern classic. It is a slight volume and a slight tale, but it can be read by people of all ages. As many know, it received the Disney imprint a few years ago, though the Disney interpretation was one of the film producer's lesser efforts.
It is a tale of the frontier, about a white boy captured by the Indians when he was only 4 adopted into the tribe and renamed and raised as "True Son." The boy grows to manhood as an Indian, thinks as an Indian, and then is returned to his original people after a treaty with the Indians.
MRS. PARKINGTON, Louis Bromfield (Pyramid, 60 cents).
Few American novelists of the thirties and forties surpassed Louis Bromfield in the unreeling of rich, panoramic stories of detail and color. "Mrs. Parkington" is a book of this type, and it was the basis of one of those many Greer Garson-Walter Fidgeon movies of the World War II era.
The story is that of a girl out of a rough Nevada town, who marries a robber baron of the Gilded Age, becomes a grand dame, and watches her family and America change about her.
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