Watch Them Grow!

Six Children Worth Meeting

By Eugenia Thornton

You must meet the Matthews family. They are just possibly the least lovable family group since the breakup of the House of Atreus, but you can no more stop reading about them than you can swear off the history of Agamemnon's hearth and home.

Angus Wilson has created the Matthews children and their parents as chief protagonists of his new novel. No Laughing Matter (Viking; $6.95). Theirs is a saga of English life from 1912 to this year of grace and their story is really a collection of crises in personal selfdelusion, in and by which they reflect our times.

The writing father of the clan, called "Billy-Pop," and his wily, witless wife whom the children call "The Countess," are a pair of urban raggle-taggle gypsies. Their personal charm does not for a moment deceive any of their six children who, throughout their lives,

disguised as bitter stories.

Sukey is the domestic daughter, the very archetype of momism carried to imperial heights. Last of all

is Marcus, whose childhood was such that he could not become other than the be-

mock them, fear them, despise them and are branded guiling art-collecting, homoby them.

THESE SIX children whom we watch grow from whom we watch grow from youth into old age are the most brilliantly conceived sextet I can think of in contemporary fiction.

The eldest is Quentin, radical journalist. Then comes Gladys, a kind of noble fool whose eventual long love affair with a married man brings her success and a disaster. After her is Rupert the actor, followed by Margaret the writer, whose first triumphs come in faintly concealed family memories

sexual dilettante he is.

EVERY ONE of these ma-

jor characters simply leaps from the pages of No Laughing Matter to become part of one's personal experience. The consummate skill with which Wilson has woven their careers with the public events through which they and most of us have lived, at least partially, gives the book an urgent immediacy of power which, like it or not, is irresistible.

I think I should say right here that some people are NOT going to like either the book or its characters for that very reason, though the excuse they will make is that old one "why read about unpleasant people?"

I should like to suggest that one reason for doing so is that we are not, perhaps, any one of us as pleasant as we should like to think we are, and that any Panglossian certitudes about "the

í

stand

up

best of all possible worlds" simply cannot against the intelligence, wit and shattering perspicacity of Angus Wilson.

+

No Laughing Matter is the best novel I have read in an

embarrassingly long time. If you miss it you ought to be ashamed of yourself!