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Italian novels were still being imported, but in diminishing number and quality. Best of a thin lot was Alberto Moravia's Two Adolescents, two fine, perfectly turned long stories about difficult boyhood. Worthy but dull, at least in translation, was Riccardo Bacchelli's ambitious, much-praised historical novel, The Mill on the Po.
One of the most fascinating novels of the year was Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a chilling account of inhuman Soviet bureaucracy by a man who knew it well. U.S. readers left it virtually unnoticed in their rush to make a bestseller of a fat Finnish historical pudding, The Adventurer, by Mika Waltari, author of last year's bestselling The Egyptian.
War novels were fewer, and the better ones came from abroad. Best of the lot, and the best of all World War II novels of infantry fighting, was New Zealander Guthrie Wilson's first novel, Brave Company, a book that most writers of war novels could read with profit. Briton Alexander Baron showed that he, too, understood his infantrymen in The Wine of Etna, a novel about British troops in Sicily.
Nightmares & the River. Most of what was interesting in U.S. novels came from the younger writers, most of them first novelists.
In A Woman of Means, Peter Taylor wrote a mature and modest first book about a difficult boy-stepmother relationship. Hans Ruesch tried an offbeat background and brought off a vivid story of Eskimo manners & morals in Top of the World. Most polished of the preciousness school novels was A Long Day's Dying, by Frederick Buechner, a 23-year-old disciple of Henry James. There was nothing precious about young (24) John Hawkes's The Cannibal, a sometimes powerful experimental novel that tried to capture the nightmarish quality of Germany's disintegration in defeat. The Harper Prize of $10,000 went to Debby, Max Steele's sentimental first novel about a bemused little woman with a big heart and a feeble mind. A shirt manufacturer from Iowa, Richard Bissell, wrote A Stretch on the River, a first novel about Mississippi River boatmen, and got as much tang into his account as anyone since Mark Twain.
One of the solidest and best of the year's firsts was The Encounter, Crawford Power's portrayal of a parish priest's struggle with pride. Another was The Trouble of One House, in which Brendan Gill made a civilized, gently ironic comment on the trouble that can blow up in the wake of unselfish love.
NON-FICTION
People looking for final answers in books found disappointingly few in the 1950 crop—though there was plenty of advice on the market and plenty of expert individual testimony of the I-came-to-realize variety. Actually, the non-fiction book that most people carried home from the bookstores was The Baby, the latest of the wacky $1 picture books to break into the big money (325,000 sold to date).