THIS IS THE SCHOOLROOMNicholas MonsarratKnopf ($2.50).
This novel's first sentence is: "I was unusually drunk the night my father died." The speaker is Marcus Hendrycks, a 21-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, reeking rich. He proceeds to paint a sharper-than-average picture of gambling, snobbery and alcoholism among the more gilded British collegians. At the end of his wild night he finds that his father is not only dead but bankrupt and that his real life has begun. On thin savings he subsists for a while in a shabby-genteel London boardinghouse, at length moves on to the full depth of the slums.
Meanwhile his brain has come...