Throw out the Paddle and Get a Reactor

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. Simon and Schuster. $5.95.
Letting Go by Philip Roth. Random House. $5.95.
The Reivers by William Faulkner. Random House. $4.95.
The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. $4.95
A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley. Doubleday and Company. $3.95.

Many and various fuels feed the furnaces of novels, and, because the novel is such a marvelous piece of machinery, nearly all of them will work, will keep the craft moving. Some novelists burn themselves as fuel. (D. H. Lawrence, Jack Kerouac.) Others rely on Story, a dependable fuel like coal, embedded in the ages. Story-propelled novels stand out on the skyline as ships on the move. One look at them and we know they are going some place. E. M. Forster says that all novels are going some place. Perhaps they are. But some of them carry more fuel than others, and some appear to be going no place at all. Some even disappear, like submarines, and down we go through the dark and silent waters of the human psyche. I don’t know what fuel the novelist is using to reach such depths. Not Story certainly, or not much Story. The main ingredients of Fuel X have been refined from the crude energies of Freud’s enormous head, a pool under the desert—with a few lumps of Story thrown into it. Whatever the fuel is, it’s a potent one and sends novels like Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook plunging into the private worlds of her characters.