Books: Vols. XV & XVI

VERDUN—Jules Remains—Knopf ($3).

Pettish critics have sometimes said that reading Jules Remains' serial novel, Men of Good Will, is like reading backfiles of French newspapers from Oct. 6, 1908. The New York Times's hardworking Critic Ralph Thompson once remarked in a fit of exasperation that Remains' "theory of fiction is almost intolerable." But The New Yorker's Clifton Fadiman has stuck to his opinion that Men of Good Will "is the Comedie Humaine of and for the 20th Century." Tired critics and trustful critics have divided over the question whether the finished job (in...