FICTION

Clear trends in fiction were as absent as greatness. The novels were a mixed bag that included some good storytelling, an occasional commentary on contemporary life that reached the mark, an unceasing flow of hackwork by old, bestselling pros. Among the best, the most popular and the most interesting:

NOT AS A STRANGER, by Morton Thompson, was the year's biggest bestseller, by a writer who died at 45 before his book was published. This sprawling story of a dedicated doctor won its audience with sincerity, energy and enough consulting-room detail to satisfy the most demanding hypochondriac.

THE GREEK PASSION, by Nikos Kozcmtzakis. This parable of the Christian challenge and Christ's suffering, played out by Greek Orthodox characters in a Turkish setting, was drenched with irony, pain and life, ingredients that are not apt to win even so good a writer as Kazantzakis the readership he deserves.

MOSCOW, by Theodor Plievier, was certainly the most memorable book of the year about World War II, a flaming near-documentary about German victory and defeat in Russia.

THE BAD SEED, by William March, told the horror story of a little monster touched with congenital sin, a pigtailed murderer only eight years old. It was done with quiet skill by an underrated U.S. writer who died within the year. This week it appeared on Broadway in an expert dramatization by Maxwell Anderson (see THEATER).

MORE STORIES, by Frank O'Connor. Stories of ordinary Irish people done with unobtrusive skill by one of the best short-story writers alive.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, by Davis Grubb. An exercise in terror in which a psychopathic evangelist and murderer creates a nightmare world for a mother and her two young children. Exceptionally effective for a first novelist.

A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE, by Erich Remarque, proved once more that Remarque would be remembered for All Quiet on the Western Front. The new one was a plodding, predictable story about a German soldier's love-on-furlough, with inconclusive excursions into the German conscience.

HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS, by Marguerite Yourcenar, was a cool, cleanly written novel in the form of a letter from Roman Emperor Hadrian to his adopted grandson, Marcus Aurelius. It made most of the year's best-selling historicals seem like blowsy farces.

THE FIRE-RAISERS, by Marris Murray, was one of the best entries in the year's huge literary safari to Africa. It was a merciless diagnosis of what its South African author calls "Africa sick ness," the complex of racial snobbery, fear and prejudice which has poisoned the lives of her white characters.

THE FALL OF A TITAN, by Igor Gouzenko. An indictment of the Soviet system in the form of a novel by the Russian code clerk who exposed his country's atomic espionage net in Canada and the U.S. An important and frequently exciting exposure of Communist ruthlessness and what it does to those it touches.

SWEET THURSDAY, by John Steinbeck. Cannery Row warmed over. A slovenly cast of characters included the familiar and tiresome Steinbeck bums, prostitutes and other scroungers who still seem to have bestseller appeal.

THE DOLLMAKER, by Harriette Arnow, described the trials of a Kentucky hill woman and her family in wartime Detroit. Large, bighearted and somewhat ponderous, like its heroine, this novel's integrity was repaid by a long run on the bestseller lists.

MARY ANNE, by Daphne du Maurier, was a bestselling near-biography of 19th century trollop Mary Anne Clarke, bed companion of the Duke of York and the great-great-grandmother of Daphne du Maurier.

THE VIEW FROM POMPEY'S HEAD, by Hamilton Basso, may easily have been the most overrated novel of the year. In watered-down Marquand-ese, it told the tiresomely plotted story of a New York lawyer's return to his hometown on business, of the memories dredged up and the hero's longtime-nosee responses.

MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED, by John Dos Possos, started happily by being a satirical skinning of party-line liberals of the 1920s and '30s, lost its effectiveness when its once-leftist author got too sore at his gullible and tiresome hero-villain.

A FABLE, by William Faulkner. At close to his tortuous worst, Faulkner baldly used the story of the Passion Week to tell about a mutiny in the Allied lines of World War I.

THE BLACK SWAN, by Thomas Mann. At 78, the Nobel Prizewinner produced his most tired book, the story of a German widow who thinks she is not too old to love but dies before she can prove it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.