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FICTION For U.S. novelists—the established, the still-maturing and the beginners—it was a productive year. But of the big-reputation writers, John Phillips Marquand alone improved on past performance. In Point of No Return he cannily mirrored the disturbing combination of ambition, worldly success and inner discontent that gnaws at U.S. middle-class peace of mind, and his novel dominated bestseller lists for much of the year. Sinclair Lewis, Marquand's own literary hero, made a pass at historical fiction with a religious twist in The God-Seeker, his 21st novel. He missed so badly that admirers of Babbitt and Arrowsmith politely looked the other way. John Dos Passos, whose radical trilogy, U.S.A., is a literary landmark of the '30s, completed another, less satisfying trilogy with The Grand Design, a preachy, disillusioned novel about New Dealers in Washington. Novels about the war were neither very good nor very popular. Though last year's The Naked and the Dead died hard on '49 bestseller lists, no new war fiction got far beyond its beachhead. Best of the lot was From the City, From the Plow, Englishman Alexander Baron's quietly terrifying story of a doomed British infantry battalion. Of the U.S. entries, only Alfred Hayes's The Girl on the Via Flaminia, a study of G.I. frustration and Italian despair, seemed likely to survive the year in which it was written. Big-name fiction with a religious theme, all of it conspicuously short on literary merit, was as popular as ever. The Big Fisherman, Lloyd Douglas' top bestseller of last year, again outsold every other novel in 1949. Paul Wellman's The Chain, a story about a two-fisted Episcopal minister, never got into Fisherman's class, but Sholem Asch's Mary, with its author's past successes and a huge ad campaign behind it, walked close on The Egyptian's heels. Several U.S. novelists with rabid cheering sections let their fans down badly. Philip Wylie's Opus 21 was a dreary mixture of sex, animadversions on life, and cocktail-hour psychiatry. Christopher Morley's large audience showed more sense than his publishers when they bypassed The Man Who Made Friends with Him self, an ancient juvenile's pretentious effort to confront modern life with nervous puns arid snippings from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The saddest failure and the most unexpected was John O'Hara's A Rage to Live, a pointless novel about an unfaithful wife. But its frank preoccupation with sex and O'Hara's old reputation for taut, incisive writing made it an immediate bestseller.