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THEODORE SOLOTAROFF
by a group of characters who required no more imagination to in–
vent and set
in
motion than it takes to write a script for Brigitte
Bardot. There is Harry Lane, the dashing young public relations
man, his beautiful, chaste, respectable sweetheart, and the sober
bank manager, Scotty Bowman, who finds in Harry's soft and
pleasant life all that he has missed, as the saying goes. There is also
Mike Kon, an intelligent ex-pug turned gentlemen's tailor, who
watches gloomily as his friend Scotty gets his head turned, a lovely
tart named Annie Laurie whose heart is made of you-know-what,
a Jewish whiskey distiller who affects English manners and wants
nothing so much as to be accepted by the Gentiles, and an as–
sorted group of journalists, promotors and men-about-town, who
are also no better or worse than they should be. In a short time
the bank manager implicates and betrays Harry by a well-inten–
tioned bit of embezzlement. After Scotty commits suicide, the
novel settles down to describing Harry's efforts to vindicate him–
self, largely by harassing the tailor who had testified against him
at the trial. There is some complexity in the subsequent relations
between these two self-righteous men and there is also Lane's or–
deal of self-inflicted humiliation which has a certain topical in–
terest. Even the very masculine, no-nonsense writers like O'Hara,
Cozzens and Callaghan seem to have become a little superstitious
about the value of suffering; and it is not only among the Jewish
fictionists that failure and loss and humiliation are taken these
days as the highroad to self-discovery and moral intelligence. How–
ever, Callaghan seems at the same time to accept pretty much at
face value the brittle and frivolous social order in which he places
his moral conflict (hence the imexamined cliches of which his
characters and milieu are composed) and the novel ends up on
the rocks of what are finally ambivalent and sentimental assump–
tions about modern society.
Alan Sillitoe's novel is a departure from the writing he has
done till now and here too I have to say there is a distinct falling
off-particularly from the clarity and power of
Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning.
In this first novel, Sillitoe delineated with
remarkable concreteness and sensitivity the life of the English
Midlands factory worker and was particularly impressive
in
ren–
dering the slow, violent poetry of a young drill press operator's
