(5 of 7)
Roth's second book involved the boldest sort of risk taking. Letting Go is a long, complex novel about the entanglements of two of those songless goliards, the young university instructors. It is sober and often solemn; with a self-confidence approaching bravado, Roth refused to use in it the skill at satirical pastiches that had glittered so brilliantly in Goodbye, Columbus. "I had done that," he said recently, "Why do it again?"
What Roth discovered in Letting Go was a great prairie of writing space. "It was like being an artist and discovering a big canvas. It was the most exhilarating writing experience I ever had." Updike, who is a miniaturist, calls Roth's novel "overblown," but what limits the book to partial success is not its great size. Rather it is Roth's treatment of his hero, a tedious young English instructor who looks within himself and finds the world empty. Roth chose to write of this frail spirit in the first person, and trapped himself by accepting the instructor's lugubrious self-assessment.
The result is one of those fitfully brilliant books that enhance their author's reputation without ever really gathering a following of their own. But his third novel will be read with higher hopes than could be generated by any book whose publication can be foreseen.
H. L. Humes, 36, a founder of the Paris Review and the author of two books, Underground City and Men Die, is a New Yorker who was trained as a scientist at M.I.T. and whose interests include cosmological theory, civic reform in Manhattan, and the feasibility of selling houses made of paper. Humes's novels have excesses that mark them recognizably as first and second books, but they are rich with life and intelligence. Underground City, set in France during the Resistance and the early postwar days, is, notably, the only novel in memory that achieves both dignity and passion in dealing with the predicament of the patriot who is not a flag kisser. Men Die, which is concerned with race hatred and other crippling manias, is audaciously and successfully arty. The central incident of the book is an explosion that wrecks a Caribbean naval base. Humes's time sequence begins with the detonation and is hurled about in jagged fragments—precisely the imprecise arrangement of an explosion. The author gets away with this, which suggests the quality of his skill. Humes is now at work on a play, two movies, and a scientific treatise in which he hopes to explain, among many other things, the origin of hailstorms and the nature of magnetism.
Ralph Ellison, a Negro, is skilled as a novelist to the degree that James Baldwin, also a Negro, is skilled as an essayist. That is to say, he is among the very best of all U.S. writers, whatever the shade of their skin. But Negro writers quite properly find inexhaustible subject matter in their own racial wounds.