SOURCE: "John Fowles Is Fair," in The New Leader, Vol. LVII, No. 24, December 9, 1974, pp. 6-8.

Below, Kapp offers a mixed appraisal of The Ebony Tower.

Though readers will never cease to long for great storytellers, the only ones around in America today—with the possible exceptions of Eudora Welty and John Cheever— are Jewish authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud and the Saul Bellow of Henderson the Rain King. They have somehow managed to nurture the gift, while the fiction writers who came after F. Scott Fitzgerald have in general either lost it or relegated it to shouldering heavy social burdens.

Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Joseph Heller, for example, see themselves first and last as creatures of a society that disfigures us, and it is this disfigurement that they feel obliged to embody in their prose. Vonnegut has never risen from the rubble of bombed...