Whan that Aprille

For me a novel, as distinct from a poem or a play, has at least one absolute obligation: to acquaint me with some people in whose existence I can believe. I don’t have to like these people, nor is it necessary that I respect them, share their presumptions, or even understand them. I must only be convinced, while I hold their book in my hands, that they are unique members of the human race. I must be able to suspend my awareness that the blurb has called their lives a “fiction.” If their author does not enable me to do this, then whatever his intentions, I cannot call him a novelist. He may be an allegorist, a fabulist, a fantasist, a great man, a poet, anything else in the dictionary. But he is not a novelist.

I would hardly feel obliged to confirm so unstartling a parti pris if, in reading through a random decade of spring novels, I had not found that only two gave me any serious sense of encountering the children of Adam. It is-well, curious, anyway-to see how many infra-novels there are among us, how much literal fiction is on the market, and how few books there are which take the trouble, or have the power, to evoke credible people. For instance, in Erskine Caldwell’s new novel, Claudelle Inglish (Little, Brown, $3.75), there are names, circumstances, woodlands, automobiles, but the human beings are so many total eclipses.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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For me a novel, as distinct from a poem or a play, has at least one absolute obligation: to acquaint me with some people in whose existence I can believe. I don’t have to like these people, nor is it necessary that I respect them, share their presumptions, or even understand them. I must only be convinced, while I hold their book in my hands, that they are unique members of the human race. I must be able to suspend my awareness that the blurb has called their lives a “fiction.” If their author does not enable me to do this, then whatever his intentions, I cannot call him a novelist. He may be an allegorist, a fabulist, a fantasist, a great man, a poet, anything else in the dictionary. But he is not a novelist.

I would hardly feel obliged to confirm so unstartling a parti pris if, in reading through a random decade of spring novels, I had not found that only two gave me any serious sense of encountering the children of Adam. It is-well, curious, anyway-to see how many infra-novels there are among us, how much literal fiction is on the market, and how few books there are which take the trouble, or have the power, to evoke credible people. For instance, in Erskine Caldwell’s new novel, Claudelle Inglish (Little, Brown, $3.75), there are names, circumstances, woodlands, automobiles, but the human beings are so many total eclipses.