Books: Hurry, Godot, Hurry

MURPHY (282 pp.)—Samuel Beckett—Grove Press ($3.50).

Few serious critics now suppose that Dublin-born Paris Expatriate Samuel Beckett is trying to pull their legs. What seems more likely with each book or play that comes along is that he is compulsively pulling at his own. In Waiting for Godot (TIME, April 30), playgoers left the theater sure of only one thing: Godot (God?) never showed up. But through their fuzzy, flavorsome big-and-small talk, through their palateless licking of life and lifelessness, the play's hopeless tramps left the impression that nothing would have happened even if Godot had appeared. In the novel Malone Dies...