The Year of the Novel

THERE are depressing moments when it seems that book publishers subsist largely on war, revolution, genocide, cowboys, Indians, literary homosexuals and the Kennedys. Nearly as often as God, the novel is pronounced dead--by prophets like John Barth, who splices novels from tapes, or apostates like Truman Capote, who labeled In Cold Blood a nonfiction novel. But the novel refuses to go away, and 1969 promises to be one of the richest years in recent memory.

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The man whom most people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, Vladimir Nabokov, will publish his first new book since Pale Fire. Called Ada, it is Delphically described by the author as "an attempt to grapple with the problem of time." Saul Bellow, the man whom most of the other people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, has a new novel too. Like his bestselling Herzog, it will deal with urban intellectuals, more than ever a promising subject since Norman Podhoretz's Making It made it so big.

Neither of these books is awaited with the eagerness that attends Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (TIME, May 17), which comes on the scene next month after the greatest prepublication fanfare since Death of a President. The plot tells the sexual misadventures of Alex Portnoy from priapic adolescence in Newark to insatiable maturity in New York City government. Excerpts have appeared in the New American Review and Partisan Review as well as in Esquire, and the unpublished book has already earned over half a million dollars. Its real value, though, lies in Roth's revelation of a brilliant urban intelligence confronting the chaos of modern life and his own psyche --written with irony, outrage and hysterical laughter.

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The spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden--which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming and plotting on the part of the prize jury (TIME, Nov. 29) to provide material for a brilliant satire. The winning author is Bernard Clavel, and his story, modeled on his parents' life, is about the bitter years of the Nazi occupation. The

French export market, too, will reintroduce U.S. readers to a celebrated Gallic misogynist, Henry de Montherlant, through four novels that first earned him his reputation, now bound and translated under a single title (The Girls).

Women will be heard from in other ways. Doris Lessing, forsaking African memories and revelations of the inner world of the feminine intellect in London, plunges into fictional futurism with a book called 7999. Eudora Welty, the soft-voiced but enduring prose mistress of Mississippi, is bringing out her first novel in 15 years. Jean Stafford (Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion), who has also siphoned off much energy into intricate short stories, has finished her first novel in 17 years. Titled A Parliament of Women, it is set in the author's native Colorado, and one of the main characters will be based on her father, a redoubtable writer of westerns (under pseudonyms like Ben Delight and Jack Wonder) who died in his 90s.

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In general, the sequel (The Carpetbaggers Run for President) is a form favored by authors whose main interest is cash. But more and more serious writers are adding rooms and views to already created structures. In Numquam, Lawrence Durrell continues his story (begun in Tune) of the "thinking weed" Felix Charlock and his struggles with the vast Merlin corporation. Isaac Bashevis Singer transplants the children from The Manor in Poland to The Estate in America. Elsewhere in Europe, Sarah Gainham conducts what is left of her cast of Viennese characters from Night Falls on the City into the postwar era. C. P. Snow has achieved a double sequel of sorts: the tenth novel in his Strangers and Brothers series seems to be an offshoot of On Iniquity, his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson's recent moralistic account of the Manchester Moors murders. In Sir Charles' version of perversion, two lesbians butcher an eight-year-old boy.

Among more blatantly commercial novels, there are a couple of noteworthy categories. One is already known in the trade as Rosemary's Babies, since Ira Levin's bestseller (4,400,000 sales in paperback alone) has clearly inspired others to deal with the devil. Among them: The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart (a pianist kills and inhabits the body of a long-fingered friend), and Don't Rely on Gemini by Vin Packer (the Corsican brothers in outer space). The last author is pseudonymous, but he has to come from Green Bay.

Another genre might be called Installation Romance. By George R. Stewart (Storm), out of Vicki Baum (Grand Hotel), such books lure the reader into the pullulating heart of some modern institution, which thereafter teems with professional expertise and ersatz emotion. Among the best and most successful recent examples are Arthur Hailey's Hotel and Airport. Next year, intrepid fiction reporters will go inside such serious installations as hospitals (The Death Committee by Noah Gordon), the aircraft industry (Brood of Eagles by Richard Stern), and the construction of a New York skyscraper (The Builders by William Woolfollc).

But decadence is already setting in with proposed trips to the mock world of TV (The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann), public relations (The Image Men by J. B. Priestley and The Fame Game by Rona Jaffe), not to mention high fashion (The Collection by Paul Montana) and publishing itself (The Center of the Action by Jerome Weid-man). Probably in this category, too, belongs Henry Sutton's The Voyeur, which he says is not about Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire.

In addition there will be products by two perpetual leaseholders on bestseller lists, Irving Wallace and Harold Rabbins. Descriptions of their books' contents are hard to come by. Mr. Wallace doesn't like to reveal his plots too far in advance. Mr. Robbins, who makes his up as he goes along, hasn't got to the dictaphone yet.

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