Fiction Chronicle

As always, any season, there are dozens to choose from, and the five I have picked from the ten I happened to read, are not necessarily the best, the most original, nor even the most likely to spend a week end with the National Book Awards judges next year. But they are all worth reading for one reason or another; and certainly if you try this particular quintet, you’ll end up laughing at all the owls who periodically warn us that the novel is dead. No form which can accommodate such a variety of purpose, temperament, insight, and general verbal conduct can be anything but alive. A viable novel, after all, has only one requirement. The only thing it has to do, somewhere along the line, is produce people and give us a sense of their happening. The rest is carte blanche: it can preach causes, probe motives, paint landscapes, parade its own prose, even break into rhyme.

Perhaps it is because they are males, thinking types who are concerned with immediate social questions, that Leo Townsend and Geoffrey Wagner both use the novel to offer us tracts for the times. In The Young Life (John Day, $3.95), Mr. Townsend diagnoses what we call juvenile delinquency. An Englishman, he sets his story in London, but the same consequences could transpire in any other large Western city. A fourteen-year-old girl is attacked on the street and raped by a gang of bored roughnecks. The girl suffers permanent emotional alienation from men; the gang leader goes unpunished, and a few years later commits a murder, for which in turn he is spared hanging. But what Mr. Townsend really wishes to show us are the people around these youngsters, the conscientious citizenry from psychiatrist to priest to neighbor who, out of their well-meaning intent to understand, rehabilitate and protect the offender, actually set aside and even deplore the equally important necessity of punishing him.

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Robert Phelps

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As always, any season, there are dozens to choose from, and the five I have picked from the ten I happened to read, are not necessarily the best, the most original, nor even the most likely to spend a week end with the National Book Awards judges next year. But they are all worth reading for one reason or another; and certainly if you try this particular quintet, you’ll end up laughing at all the owls who periodically warn us that the novel is dead. No form which can accommodate such a variety of purpose, temperament, insight, and general verbal conduct can be anything but alive. A viable novel, after all, has only one requirement. The only thing it has to do, somewhere along the line, is produce people and give us a sense of their happening. The rest is carte blanche: it can preach causes, probe motives, paint landscapes, parade its own prose, even break into rhyme.

Perhaps it is because they are males, thinking types who are concerned with immediate social questions, that Leo Townsend and Geoffrey Wagner both use the novel to offer us tracts for the times. In The Young Life (John Day, $3.95), Mr. Townsend diagnoses what we call juvenile delinquency. An Englishman, he sets his story in London, but the same consequences could transpire in any other large Western city. A fourteen-year-old girl is attacked on the street and raped by a gang of bored roughnecks. The girl suffers permanent emotional alienation from men; the gang leader goes unpunished, and a few years later commits a murder, for which in turn he is spared hanging. But what Mr. Townsend really wishes to show us are the people around these youngsters, the conscientious citizenry from psychiatrist to priest to neighbor who, out of their well-meaning intent to understand, rehabilitate and protect the offender, actually set aside and even deplore the equally important necessity of punishing him.