Books: Life Is a Four-Letter Word

SOME CAME RUNNING (1,266 pp.)—James Jones—Scribner ($7.50).

James Jones is the Stanley Kowalski of U.S. letters. Bulked into the sweaty T shirt of latter-day realism, he stirs raw sex, raw talk, raw emotions and raw ideas in a crude vat of the rawest home-brewed English. In From Here to Eternity, this concoction helped put across Novelist Jones's abrasive vision of a little-known area of U.S. life, the peacetime Regular Army. Steamy with sex, Some Came Running may hit the same one-armed bandit of bestselling success, but it is more than one-third longer (some 700,000 words in all) than king-sized Eternity—and three-thirds duller.

Dave...