Books: Room at the Bottom

FROM THE HAND OF THE HUNTER (277 pp.) — John Braine — Houghfon M/'f-flin ($3.75).

In Room at the Top (TIME, May 27, 1957), British Novelist John Braine dealt with the reek of ill-gained success as experienced by a bounder inwardly appalled by his own amorality. In his second novel, Braine deals with the opposite, savors the sour scent of failure as lived by a welfare-state weakling. When the book opens, Dick Corvey, the novel's nonhero, is in a tuberculosis hospital. Behind him lie an army stretch marked by cowardice and a childhood marred...