Fiction

The distinction of having written the year's best novel went to the old master, Ernest Hemingway. His The Old Man and the Sea was a beautifully conceived, tightly written fishing story in praise of man's courage and the nobility of nature. The story appeared in LIFE (circ. 5,325,447) and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection; that lost Hemingway a place on the top end of the bestseller list (which is compiled from bookstore sales), but it gave him the greatest immediate audience ever reached by a serious novelist.

The true bookseller's delight was Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, first published in March 1951. Never off the bestseller list, and mostly at the top, its sales in all editions reached 1,000,000. The other leaders--Costain, Keyes, Ferber, Du Maurier--moved along predictable roads, leaving their familiar footprints without increasing or diminishing their reputations. John Steinbeck's East of Eden was not predictable, but its loose, woolly yarn on good & evil, featuring a sensational and improbable prostitute, dazzled a lot of readers and critics.

The most interesting new U.S. novelist was a 38-year-old Negro, Ralph Ellison. His Invisible Man was the picaresque epic of a Southern Negro trying to find a place in a white man's world. Not always in focus, its flair and vitality nevertheless made it one of the year's standouts. From another world was Louis Kronenberger's witty verbal quadrille, Grand Right and Left, about a bored billionaire who collects people instead of butterflies.

The Middle Ranks. One way or another, it was a great year for Texas. After an ill-tempered clouting of its manners & morals by Edna Ferber in her bestselling Giant, the state produced three of the most widely talked-about books of the year: Madison Cooper's Sironia, Texas, a 1,731-page Texas-town saga which seemed to prove that Ferber's view had been right in the first place; Tom Lea's The Wonderful Country, singing Lea's love of his Rio Grande country, north & south of the border; and The Devil Rides Outside, by Texan John Griffin, in which a young American finds his own City of God in a French monastery.

There were a few U.S. novelists in the middle ranks who gave promise of reaching the top some day. From the South came two novels shucked clean of old magnolia and Faulkneresque gothic: Thomas Hal Phillips' neatly written, believable son & father story, Search for a Hero; and Worth Tuttle Hedden's Love Is a Wound, a thoroughly honest and quietly dramatic tale of slavish and unrequited love in North Carolina. By & large, U.S. writers seemed to serve up fewer wormwood cocktails, fewer canapes of neurosis and despair, than in previous years. A selfconsciously written, cliche-laden, but interesting novel, Executive Suite, by Cameron Hawley, even dared to draw an understanding picture of a U.S. corporation and of a businessman who was not a cross between Babbitt and Captain Bligh.

The Imports. The U.S. produced the bestsellers, but again it was the European novelists who gave fiction its flash and heat. Italy's postwar literary Vesuvius was by now coughing up old coals, but the reading temperature was still high. The moods ran from Alberto Moravia's shoulder-shrugging political satire in The Fancy Dress Party to Vasco Pratolini's tenderly realistic tale of Florentine youth in The Naked Streets.

French Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac won the Nobel Prize and few denied the justness of the choice. His tiny U.S. audience (sales: about 3,000 a book in 1952) saw him in translation twice: The Weakling and The Enemy, The Loved and the Unloved. Both of them skillfully rang changes on Mauriac's Graham Greene-like preoccupations: temptation, sin, spiritual sloth, man's corruption. Marcel Ayme, a quite different kind of French novelist and one of the best alive, looked with a more complacent eye at human folly in The Second Face, a cleanly turned satire on marriago and vanity.

Two novels spoke more eloquently of totalitarian terror than most factual exposes. Egon Hostovsky, a former Czech diplomat, showed in Missing how his native country slipped into Moscow's grip. It read like a thriller, but had the ring of truth. More chilling than thrilling, and even truer, was Australian Godfrey Blunden's skillful vivisection of the totalitarian mind, The Time of the Assassins, a story of hapless Ukrainians who during the war tried to make a choice between Communism and Naziism but found that the same terror was at the dead center of both. Offbeat, and very good in a Tristram Shandyish way, was Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Brazil's greatest writer, Machado de Assis, a ghost's witty, unsurprised backward look at life.

From England came a new novel by Joyce Cary, Prisoner of Grace, which proved again what not enough U.S. readers seem to know: that Cary is one of the few living novelists who find life and people more interesting than his private gripes or despairs.

Evelyn Waugh, in whose earlier books the quality of mercy had usually been missing, was in a mellower, more mature mood in Men at Arms, a fine first installment of a trilogy about men and war. Look Down in Mercy was a good first novel about combat in the Pacific by a Briton, Walter Baxter, who could tell Waugh a lot about war. Finally, there came from England the two best historical novels of the year: Edith Simon's The Golden Hand, a leisurely, lyrical tale about a 14th century English cathedral town and the faith that sustained it; and H. F. M. Prescott's The Man on a Donkey, a long period piece about England under Henry the Eighth, which proved that literacy and historical fiction could live between the same boards.

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