THOSE WHO LOVE by Irving Stone. 662 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.
In this long, painstakingly researched biographical novel of John and Abigail Adams, Novelist Stone has had the good judgment to stick to the historical facts and the good grace to forsake, largely, the flamboyant style that marred his bestselling biographical novels about Van Gogh (Lust for Life) and Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy). He lapses occasionally by trying to make the plain but amusing Abigail into a pert glamour girl, but he manages to convey the softening influence she had on her crotchety and unbending husband, from the day he first came calling when she was 17 until the moment, 40 years later, when they departed the still unfinished White House. As fictional biographies go, this is a competent job. But both John and Abigail Adams had a compulsion to put words on paper and then saved every scrap. Discriminating readers will find that the numerous volumes of their letters and diaries give a far better picture of their times and their relationship.
THE MANDELBAUAA GATE by Muriel Spark. 369 pages. Knopf. $5.95.
Scottish Novelist Muriel Spark has never been particularly fond of any of her characters. At best, she regards them with amused detachment, and in such finely spun structures of malice as The Bachelors and The Girls of Slender Means, she meticulously exposed their peculiarities and quivering insecurities. Unhappily, in this, her eighth and longest novel, Novelist Spark finally pays dearly for her indifference. She is obviously much more interested in the sights and sounds on both sides of the Mandelbaum Gate, which separates Israel and Jordan, than she is in her characters, and soon the reader discovers that he is too. Worse still, in order to shift them around, Novelist Spark resorts to a series of involved intrigues and page after page of gentle nattering. For a writer whose prose is generally among the most direct and polished in the business, this must have been a chore. For the reader, it is deadly.
THEY BOTH WERE NAKED by Philip Wylie. 418 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.
In a relentless stream of splenetic essays and novels, Philip Wylie has profitably lambasted Mom, Pop, the common man, the businessman, the scientific man, sexy advertising, and American apathy in the face of potential nuclear disaster. Now he reports his latest revelation. Incestuous feelings are natural and healthy, but the fear of incest is the root of all evil. He discovers very TIME, NOVEMBER 5, 1965 little that is not evil in this tour through the libidinal jungle, which he ponderously describes through the eyes of a hero named — ahem — Philip Wylie. Commissioned to write the biography of an aging financier-philanthropist, Hero Wylie discovers that the old tycoon is guilty of multifarious fornications, industrial sharp practices, attempted treason, and coveting his own son's young wife. The girl ha.s a father complex, and the old man has a Mom problem — the results of incestuous love repressed in their childhood, naturally. Hero Wylie understands their problems, but when they start an affair, he burns his notes and walks out. The reader may have beaten him to the exit. Prophet Wylie's inexhaustible choler dismisses with equal contempt sexual inhibition, racism, beehive hairdos, Middle Western accents and piped music. Perhaps it is time that a kindly cop asked him, gently, to move along.