Lighten Up, Mr. Dostoevsky.

The great critic Sainte-Beuve held, I believe, a low opinion of Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal, his three most gifted contemporaries. A ridiculous mistake for anyone to make about three such famous men: and yet I sometimes wonder whether masterpieces really are so easy to spot--supposing they simply arrived on the desk with inaccurate blurbs and unfortunate jackets, like all the other novels.

The following weekly roundup, written in the style of one of our more spinsterish reviewers, illustrates perhaps the worst that could happen.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky proves that the "unedited generation" is not confined to this country. This sprawling, shapeless affair runs to some nine hundred and forty pages, of which perhaps two hundred are actually connected with the plot: the rest vapor off into amateur philosophy, mysticism, and anything else that happens to come into the author's head. (It looks, from his religious preoccupations, as though Mr. Dostoevsky rather wants to be another Graham Greene--but he hasn't bothered to learn any of Greene's craftsmanship. So sloppy is he that he begins the story in the first person and then abandons the device without explanation.)

Mr. Dostoevsky also over-writes atrociously. His characters are constantly breaking into sweats, turning green, and embracing each other quite regardless of sex. This may be meant as a commentary on post-Crimean War youth; or it may simply come from a callow desire to shock. In any case, American readers will find it incredible and not a little unpleasant.

Whether these rather tawdry, hysterical characters are worth writing a nine-hundred-page book about, is the kind of question publishers should be asking themselves seriously these days. More and more of these plotless monsters have been appearing lately, many of them from the direction of Russia, while supposedly responsible editors are content to look the other way. This one has a plot of sorts, but it seems to have been tucked in at the last minute; what there is of it is melodramatic, improbable, and drowned in verbiage. The author does seem to have a certain crude power which might be put to some use by a really good editor, like Max Perkins; but we are shocked to hear that he is already sixty-seven years old.

Going from bad to worse, we come to a native American author every bit as undisciplined as Mr. Dostoevsky and a good deal more pretentious. Moby Dick by one Herman Melville seems to have just about every fault a novel can contain. It is written in dense, pseudobiblical English (the author seems to be bucking for the title of the "new James Gould Cozzens"); nothing happens for hundreds of pages; the characters are quite unreal, especially the one called Captain Ahab, who is a stage-villain of the rankest kind; and finally the use of symbols is embarrassingly broad and overdone.

I can't pretend to know how the story finally comes out, it gets bogged down halfway in impenetrable whale-lore, at which point this reader simply tip-toed away. One begins to fear that these young authors honestly believe that everything that interests them will also interest us; that they hardly know the word discipline; that, in short, they are bores.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal is at least decently written. But it contains most of the flaws of a typical first novel. We are getting a little tired by now of these sensitive young men who take themselves with such deadly seriousness. Will Julien Sorel seduce the girl--well honestly, who cares, we want to shout after a few hundred pages.

Alas, there are no real heroes in our literature anymore. Mr. Melville's hero is a whale, Mr. Stendhal's is a rather foppish, humorless young man obviously written with the Hollywood actor Tony Perkins in mind, who thinks that the world circles around his own petty problems, and who displays none of the broad humanity of, say, Tom Jones, who at least had the courage to laugh at sex....

The young writers of today are obviously not willing to take the trouble that yields up masterpieces. They give us half-finished books, rough blueprints of books, which too often achieve a flashing, short-lived success. Mr. Charles Dickens, whose first book Pickwick Papers threatened (though grossly padded) to rank him with Evelyn Waugh, has decided instead to compete with James T. Farrell. His Oliver Twist is the kind of slice-of-life realism that makes us expostulate: photography is not art. Also, it is just as inartistic to make all your characters unpleasant. Life isn't like that, Mr. Dickens.

Oliver Twist is a seering commentary on post-Catholic Emancipation youth, with rather unpleasant anti-Semitic overtones and a set of sentimental alternatives. The book is at times little more than a spluttering tract. Yes, Mr. Dickens, we know that orphans are sometimes treated badly and that a bad environment can lead to a life of crime; but we are a little tired of having our noses rubbed in the obvious; and we are more than a little tired of watching authors, who feel that their own childhoods were unhappy, parading their self-pity in thinly disguised fictional form. Get back to comedy, Mr. Dickens, and stop trying to write "great English novels." All in all, it has been a discouraging week.