A characteristic concern of the 18th-century novelist was how people ought to behave. His 19th- century counterpart undertook a larger question, "What is right?" At the turn of the century and for decades thereafter, their successor dealt customarily with individual psychological necessity in conflict with obligations or with impersonal social forces. Today, with traditional values destroyed or under crucial attack, the serious novelist often makes a metaphysical point. He asks the ultimate question, "What is real?" 

    The nature and meaning of the human predicament, the essential reality of existence, are urgent considerations in all the contemporary arts. Such a writer as Samuel Beckett has brought this preoccupation to theater and to fiction. "Waiting for Godot" and "Molloy" are in their respective fields modern classics. It is fair, I think, to say that Beckett's work in both mediums has developed more and more severe paradigms or metaphors of the human conditions. The controlling imagery of his plays and novels is increasingly pessimistic. The sphere of human activity is rigidly confined, and contracting. The expressive gestures possible to characters are steadily shrinking. 

    It might be said that Beckett's work is a kind of material and spiritual divestiture. Each book or play gives up another thing, another aspect of freedom, another chance of communication, another bit of the veritable world. 

    In the present volume--it is hard to call it a novel--a humanoid creature crawls through the primeval mud. A jute sack, in which there is tinned food and an opener, is tied to its neck. It is making an aimless journey, likely to be circular, till "the panting stops." It is uncertain where it is, or why, or what it is, or that its ideas, memories, or intuitions of another life are real--or are its own, for even its voice, mumbling brokenly into the mud, seems to have a source other than itself. 

    The book is divided into three sections: before Pim, with Pim and after Pim. Who is Pim? Another traveler in the muck. In the encounter, when the two cling together--everything takes ages of time-- Pim is the victim, and the narrator is the tormentor. The relationship is born out of fear and need. Eventually, Pim disappears--it is the way of the victim, to get out--and the idea is developed that one is alternately the victim and tormentor, very likely encountering only the traveler immediately ahead or being encountered by the one immediately behind. 

    Mr. Beckett knows how to horrify and disgust. The matter is drawn out tortuously, the short- winded efforts of the voice made plain by a lack of punctuation in a story that proceeds by limping phrases. The images are of ingestion, quasisexual violence and defecation. A grim joke now and then bubbles up: there is no danger of running out of food; appetite diminishes faster than the food supply. 

    This is a book to be read. No amount of description will do its special qualities justice. Mr. Beckett is an artist of integrity, and his vision of life, carried forward through a number of remarkable novels and plays, has artistic importance. Moreover, he is a formal experimenter of imaginative distinction. "How It Is" offers his latest metaphor. A vision cannot be proved. Each reader will have to decide for himself how far it convinces.