Books: The Disenchanted Forest

A SENSE OF VALUES (604 pp.)—Sloan Wilson—Harper ($4.95).

In the days of Balzac and Galsworthy, the novel could legitimately deal with a businessman's success (through ambition and thrift) or with his failure (through greed, circumstance or the follies of love). A distinctly American contribution to the art of fiction is the discovery that success is failure. In the first 500 novels devoted to this notion, the unimpeachable moral that a man may lose his soul while making money proved reasonably arresting, but by now, the theme has become an overpowering bore and need no...