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One young U.S. novelist, Budd Schulberg, tackled a tough fictional theme in The Disenchanted: the crackup of a hard-drinking, gifted novelist (candidly patterned on F. Scott Fitzgerald), too weak to discipline himself or his gifts. It was only partially successful, but at the end of the year Disenchanted headed the bestseller lists and was overtaking the sales lead of the Hersey and Hemingway books.
The year's best fiction came from Europe. Britain's George Orwell died just as three of his early books were brought out, all of them showing his hatred of humbug, his bare, sharp prose style. Burmese Days is still one of the best novels ever written about the Far East, more than ever readable against 1950's headlines. Joyce Cary and Henry Green, having already made the grade with U.S. readers after a slow start, each had two books published during the year. (Two more Green novels, Caught and Concluding, are due before year's end.) Cary's The Horse's Mouth, the story of a rascally artist, was one of the richest comic novels in many a year. A Fearful Joy was not in quite the same class, but its zestful account of a woman who met an adventurous life head on still made most of the year's books seem anemic. Green's Nothing was an airy cuff at solemn young Britons who have plenty of social conscience but nowhere near the sense of fun and life of their sturdy elders. Back, a story about a wounded vet's search for happiness, showed a dip in Green's talent.
Evelyn Waugh's small stint for the year was Helena, a short, somewhat aimless novel about the saint who is credited with discovering the True Cross. Helena pleased no one so much as Waugh, who admits that, since publication, he has read it 20 times.
Irony & Puddings. Three Frenchmen sent over good little novels, full of Gallic irony and penetration, which did not get the readers they deserved. François Boyer's The Secret Game was a slight but deft exploration of the effect of war on the minds of children. In The Company of Men, Romain Gary wrote a bitterly pessimistic and effective novel about the difficulty of remaining simply human in the scrambles of postliberation France. Best of the three was Marcel Aymé's The Barkeep of Blemont, a cool, compassionate inspection of small-town suspicion and political hatreds by one of the best French writers alive.
Meanwhile, a dead French writer who wrote in the great tradition of the novel had to wait 115 years for the English translation of his "third masterpiece." Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen, unfinished at his death, is a powerful dissection of French social disintegration, the year's windfall for admirers of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Another good novel, though a minor one, was French Canadian Germaine Guevremont's affectionate and affectingly simple story of life in a Quebec farm hamlet, The Outlander. From France, though written first in Rumanian, came the Continent's fiction bestseller. Virgil Gheorghiu's The Twenty-Fifth Hour was a bitterly ironic description of the author's own misadventures in concentration and P.W. camps. Its fatalism and its blatant hostility toward the U.S. helped to explain its interest for some European readers.