Eleven years ago a few U. S. readers paid $5 for copies of a two-volume novel translated from the French, forbiddingly titled The Thibaults. Its little-known writer was Roger Martin du Gard. The imposing boxed edition was made to look even less exciting by quotations from reviews that compared the book vaguely to the works of Balzac, Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust. Martin du Gard, said the New York Herald Tribune loftily, "reconciles at once the fastidious preciosity of Proust and Rolland's passionate evangelism with the traditional body of art." In a...
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