Question: What do a child-guidance counselor, a jazz pianist, a BBC newscaster, a Peruvian living in Paris, a 26-year-old beauty from North Carolina and a 63-year-old real estate millionaire from Manhattan have in common? Answer: All are aspiring authors who have swelled one of the longest and strongest lists of first novels ever published in a single season.
Traditionally, the first novelist bursts upon the literary scene like a day-old volcano—exploding platitudes, scattering an unbreathable ash of adjectives, devouring cash advances like sacrificial maidens. The noisy thing may turn out to be a mountain or a molehill, but on the chance of producing a verbal Vesuvius most publishers annually sponsor a series of these fictional eruptions, timing them to coincide with the great silence that descends on the book business between July 4 and Labor Day.
This midsummer, 27 first novels are coming out. The list does not include another Remembrance of Things Past or even a Gone With the Wind—speaking of first novels—but it does present more than a dozen books of rippling readability, and several that promise to become bestsellers. Above all, it introduces four new novelists—Robert Crichton, James Mossman, Cynthia Ozick, Sylvia Wilkinson—whose literary skill and temperamental resonance argue remarkable things to come.
The books have strong qualities in common, and some of the qualities are deplorable. Sick sex and vicious violence recur with obsessive frequency, and so do a number of Eng. Lit. leftovers; several of the new novelists describe clouds that look "like grey wool." At least half of them, however, make nervy experiments in fictional form, and almost all show the kind of ultimate concern with human beings that is no less religious because it calls itself existential. In almost every instance, the writers courageously explore the shape of a new fiction in form and spirit adequate to the age.
In the first novels from abroad, the explorations are cautious but skillful. The Time of the Hero (Grove Press) by Mario Vargas Llosa, 28, a Paris-based Peruvian, is a social satire so harrowingly powerful that 1,000 copies were publicly burned in Lima. Vargas sets up the national military academy, which he attended, as a metaphor of his homeland, and in reciting what he sees as the horrors of life at school suggests what he thinks of life in Peru. More sophisticated is The Opoponax (Simon & Schuster) by France's lissome Monique Wittig, 31. A disciple of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French fanatic whose "objective" novels systematically reduce people to objects, Author Wittig has composed a synoptical illusion that describes how a little girl grows up by assembling on the page a collage of things she did—not a word about the things she thought or felt. French critics have called the book a masterpiece, and by Robbe-Grillet's rather special standards they are not far wrong.