A LEGACY, by Sibille Bedford. A cool, backward look at Victorian and Edwardian Europe, a time when the big rich were truly idle and upperclass life was dedicated to an endless battle with boredom. Middle-aged First-Novelist Bedford turns the cosmopolitan novel, a rare enough product nowadays, into an immensely entertaining remembrance—and indictment—of things past.
A LIGHT FOR FOOLS, by Natalia Ginzburg. A brief, near-poetic story of ordinary lives mired in the despair of Mussolini's Italy. Conceived in sympathy and written at the level of simple truth, it is one of the best Italian novels in years.
THE FALL, by Albert Camus. This year's Nobel Prizewinner edging away from existentialism toward religion in an effort to pinpoint the dilemma of modern man. His boozy, sometimes boring hero tries hard to believe that man is the center of all things, yet is more than half persuaded that he is wrapped in original sin.
THE FLYING BOX, by Mary McMinnies. An astonishingly good first novel about fumbling Britons who still pretend that they are carrying the white man's burden in Malaya. The decline and fall of Empire is measured by the spurious successes of a black-marketeering London spiv who finds loot among the ruins.
PNIN, by Vladimir Nabokov. About an émigré Russian professor at a U.S. college whose joyously ridiculous English and congenital helplessness only faintly conceal the sorrow of exile.
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE, by John Cheever. The most ruefully amusing novel of the year, a story about an old New England family on the skids, with a cast of pathetically brave left-behinds, hilarious eccentrics and nice youngsters who lack the gumption of their elders.
THE FEAST OF LUPERCAL, by Brian Moore. A book which proves that Novelist Moore's excellent first, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956) was no accident. Malice, spite, envy and sexual frustration at a boys' school in Ireland add up to ignorance triumphant—and pathos on every page.
BERLIN, by Theodor Plievier. The end of Hitler, Berlin and Germany, seen in a flaming novel that has the hallucinatory quality of a firelit death dance. The last book of a trilogy (Stalingrad and Moscow were the other two) that, collectively, tops the fiction of World War II.
THE ASSISTANT, by Bernard Malamud. An aging Jewish Brooklyn grocer, a holdup and a thief's remorse seem hardly the substance of a good novel. This book becomes one through its tender, realistic grasp of the meanings, small defeats and even smaller victories in the lives of seemingly hopeless people.
THE TOWN, by William Faulkner. The malignant, unsavory Snopeses taking over Yoknapatawpha County from the noble old families who once controlled it and gave it graciousness. Intricate and convoluted as the book is in plot and in sentence, Faulkner gives it the air of a sly village idiot's barbershop yarn.
IN THE TIME OF GREENBLOOM, by Gabriel Fielding. A too-sensitive English schoolboy goes astray on the devious paths of life and love, comes to believe that the game is not worth the candle, but is brought back to himself through the influence of Horab Greenbloom, one of the flashiest intellectual priests of the life-to-the-hilt school in recent fiction history.