(3 of 4)
FROM THE TERRACE, by John O'Hara. The biggest (897 pages), most ambitious novel of a writer who takes himself more seriously than it is possible to take his most recent books. A potentially nice rich kid from O'Hara's Pennsylvania runs short on character, presumably because of the sins of the father and the social disarrangements of his own time. The O'Hara ear for speech has the relentless giveaway of a tape recorder—but it reels on too long. Head and shoulders above the year's run of the mill, but still a semifailure.
NONFICTION
NAKED TO MINE ENEMIES, by Charles W. Ferguson. Probably the best biography yet written about Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher's son who became England's most powerful statesman. A great churchman and a genius of state administration, he fell victim to his own appetite for power, Henry VIII's displeasure and the Reformation itself. Author Ferguson sees him plain, with charity and good sense.
INSIDE RUSSIA TODAY, by John Gunther. Reporter Gunther got inside Russia for a while, bludgeoned his way through stacks of other people's books about Russia and produced the best of his Inside testimonies. Surface-smooth, unclogged by deep thought, it gives the U.S. reader the best, most colorful and most painless report available of Khrushchev-land.
PART OF A LONG STORY, by Agnes Boulton. Eugene O'Neill's second wife describes just a year and a half of her life with genius, but she makes it memorable. Great drunken sprees were wedged between great plays, and melodrama was always just around the living-room door.
SEAMARKS, by St.-John Perse. A once great diplomat, and for years one of the world's top poets, at his best in a huge, majestic but obscure celebration of the sea and its meanings in the life of man.
MARLBOROUGH'S DUCHESS, by Louis Kronenberger. A topnotch biography, continuously rich with the shine of a fabulous period, provides a full-dress portrait of an 18th century woman whom no one could underestimate until she overrated herself.
IN FLANDERS FIELDS, by Leon Wolff. Incredible bravery and even more incredible high-command folly make up the grisly story of one of the saddest campaigns of World War I. Author Wolff's account of tragedy amid blood and mud is cool, informed and horrifyingly persuasive.
THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH, translated by C. de Dood. From 1872 to 1890, when the last letter was found on his suicide's body, Van Gogh set down a harrowing record of frustrations, assorted guilts and illnesses of the mind and body. The letters find a beautiful monument in this magnificent example of bookmaking.
95 POEMS, by e. e. cummings. The perennial Pan of U.S. poetry, still mildly addicted to typographical high jinks, proves in his latest sheaf of poems that he is as fresh, vivid and strangely lyrical as ever.
MISTRESS TO AN AGE, by J. Christopher Herold. Germaine de Staël back again in a first-rate biography of the woman who rode the French Revolution like a balky horse, managed, without beauty or other feminine graces, to capture as lovers many of the foremost men of her day. Napoleon said no, and that may have been his major mistake.