Books: End of a Family

SUMMER 1914—Roger Martin du Gard— Viking ($3.50).

The world of letters blinked a little in 1937 when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Roger Martin du Gard. His long novel, Les Thibault, was little known outside France; he was something of a recluse who saw what he wanted to see of the world through a peephole, and who wrote from a photostatic recollection of his own top-drawer bourgeois life before and during World War I. When, after the award was announced, a reporter tried to stop the scurrying prizewinner for questions, Martin du Card refused to talk. The reporter asked...