Books: The Year of the Novel

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THERE are depressing moments when it seems that book publishers subsist largely on war, revolution, genocide, cowboys, Indians, literary homosexuals and the Kennedys. Nearly as often as God, the novel is pronounced dead—by prophets like John Barth, who splices novels from tapes, or apostates like Truman Capote, who labeled In Cold Blood a nonfiction novel. But the novel refuses to go away, and 1969 promises to be one of the richest years in recent memory.

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The man whom most people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, Vladimir Nabokov, will publish his first new book since Pale Fire. Called Ada, it is Delphically described by the author as "an attempt to grapple with the problem of time." Saul Bellow, the man whom most of the other people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, has a new novel too. Like his bestselling Herzog, it will deal with urban intellectuals, more than ever a promising subject since Norman Podhoretz's Making It made it so big.

Neither of these books is awaited with the eagerness that attends Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (TIME, May 17), which comes on the scene next month after the greatest prepublication fanfare since Death of a President. The plot tells the sexual misadventures of Alex Portnoy from priapic adolescence in Newark to insatiable maturity in New York City government. Excerpts have appeared in the New American Review and Partisan Review as well as in Esquire, and the unpublished book has already earned over half a million dollars. Its real value, though, lies in Roth's revelation of a brilliant urban intelligence confronting the chaos of modern life and his own psyche —written with irony, outrage and hysterical laughter.

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The spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden—which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming and plotting on the part of the prize jury (TIME, Nov. 29) to provide material for a brilliant satire. The winning author is Bernard Clavel, and his story, modeled on his parents' life, is about the bitter years of the Nazi occupation. The

French export market, too, will reintroduce U.S. readers to a celebrated Gallic misogynist, Henry de Montherlant, through four novels that first earned him his reputation, now bound and translated under a single title (The Girls).