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Du Pont Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Groucho Marx narrates a history of the automobile in the U.S. Color.
THEATER
On Broadway
The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter. In a junk-filled London room, two odd brothers and a tramp, memorably played by Donald Pleasence, illuminate the perennial questions of man's isolation from, his need for, and his quirky rejection of, his fellow man.
Among the holdovers from the past season, Mary, Mary incites full houses to laugh along with Playwright Jean Kerr. In Camelot, a new King Arthur (William Squire) presides over the Round Table. Irma La Douce is still the most delectable way to tour the Parisian underworld. Broadway's Carnival! yields nothing to its Hollywood model Lili in poignance and charm—and there is always the grande dame of Manhattan's musicals, My Fair Lady.
Off Broadway
Misalliance, by George Bernard Shaw. A happy tour de farce, written in 1910, in which G.B.S. changes his ideas every quarter-hour, and the ideas seem scarcely older, even after a half-century.
BOOKS
Best Reading
Sinclair Lewis, by Mark Schorer. The author piles up details with the enthusiasm of a squirrel in autumn, and almost succeeds in burying a fascinating biography of the scourge of Babbittry, who, throughout his years of self-exile, never really left Gopher Prairie.
A New Life, by Bernard Malamud. The author, known as a skilled allegorist for his previous novels (The Natural, The Assistant), is less successful as a writer of realistic fiction, but this novel of an Eastern intellectual's losing battle with the muscular positivism of a Western land college is nevertheless notable for its tender, Chekhovian quality.
The Adams Papers, edited by L. H. Butterfield. In the first four volumes of a projected 100-volume collection of memorabilia from the U.S.'s most noted diplomatic family, the nation's second President delivers forceful opinions on matters ranging from French jokes (shameful) to British agriculture (U.S. manure is better).
H. L. Mencken on Music, a selection by Louis Cheslock, and Letters of H. L. Mencken, a selection by Guy J. Forgue. The '20's most gifted student of the ridiculous is at his most eloquent and outrageous in these two well-chosen samplers.
Selected Tales, by Nikolai Leskov. The brilliance of this 19th century Russian author is still to be discovered by most Western readers; this collection shows him to be a taleteller of eloquence and subtle power.
Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame. Written with skill and sympathy, this novel of life in a mental institution is an unforgettable evocation of madness.
Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger. The guru of The New Yorker abstracts two stories from his cycle-in-progress on the Glass family; the result is a masterly double novella, strongly flavored with both eccentricity and genius, of a girl's brush with religious obsession.
When My Girl Comes Home, by V. S. Pritchett. Dry and controlled tales by a Briton with a keen eye for the madness that squirms in view when the ordinary is overturned.