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Even the Literary Guild, customarily little interested in unknown novelists, chose three first novels in 1953, and two were good. Stephania, a story of difficult and subtle relationships among patients in a Swedish hospital, was the surprising work of Ilona Karmel, a Polish graduate of Nazi concentration camps who wrote an adopted English that was both expert and moving. The other was Helen Fowler's The Intruder, an Australian novel about a mind-sick veteran and the family of his dead buddy. Another notable first was Mr. Nicholas, a whiplash dissection of a tyrannical London father by young (27) Briton Thomas Hinde. Two others, slickly competent, successful and considerably overrated by reviewers, were John Phillins' The Second Happiest Day and Charles Flood's Love Is a Bridge, each in its way an inconclusive excursion into the emotional difficulties of the comfortably fixed.
The richest, most exuberant novel of the year came from Greece, the work of 68-year-old Nikos Kazantzakis, a top candidate for 1952's Nobel Prize. His Zorba the Greek had a picaresque hero who, almost alone in the fiction of 1953, communicated the conviction that it is wonderful to be alive. By comparison, the chest-beating hero of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was a neurotic wise guy—though Augie did better than Zorba in the bookstores.
Two books by Giovanni Verga, an Italian writer who died in 1922, still contained lessons for any fiction writer. The House by the Medlar Tree and Little Novels of Sicily were powerful stories about Sicilian peasants whose harshly tragic existence could not destroy their stubborn dignity. Another famed Italian brought out his first novel in eleven years; A Handful of Blackberries proved that ex-Communist Ignazio Silone knows where the rot of Communism lies and still has enough of his old novelist's skill to expose it.
One of the disappointments of the year was John Hersey's The Marmot Drive, the story of a Connecticut woodchuck hunt, full of murky meanings and pseudo-archaic Yankee lingo. One of the real surprises of the year was the belated bow in fiction of aged (81) Philosopher Bertrand Russell. His Satan in the Suburbs consisted of five stories whose weird plots and good-natured skepticism made for pretty good fun.
NON-FICTION
Religious and inspirational books, together with accounts of personal adventure, stole the show all year. After the Revised Standard Bible came the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking—and it did nearly as well as the three fiction bestsellers put together. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female sold very well for an $8 book, but even at some 200,000 copies, it was not the runaway that the trade had expected. It was only one of many books on women (Frenchwoman Simone de Beauvoir's disgruntled The Second Sex was another), but all the industry and argument that went into them seemed to leave the confrontation of the sexes pretty much as before.