Agrarian Idyl

THE PLATINUM TOWER--Jerome Bahr--Scribner ($2).

Onetime traveler with a medicine show, manager of ham boxers, ex-reporter, graduate of the University of Wisconsin and protege of Ernest Hemingway, lanky, blond, 28-year-old Jerome Bahr two years ago published his first book, a volume of short stories called All Good Americans. In one of his rare prefaces, Hemingway vouched for "their solid, youthful worth, their irony, their humor, their peasant lustiness," predicted that Jerome Bahr "will write a fine novel eventually."

The Platinum Tower cannot be called the predicted "fine novel"--it is hardly a novel at all--but it is good comedy, at its best as biting as Chekhov's, at its worst, spirited family farce.

Laid on a Midwestern chicken farm, the story has a cast of four lively urban failures, drawn from what might be called the chicken-ranch school of agrarians. Mrs. Baldwin is a tumbledown, warmhearted, platinum-blonde ex-beauty. Her husband Tom is a master of alibi and bluster, who became half-blind and semi-invalid when he discovered his brother-in-law had money. Besides hatching out big money-making schemes and squabbling, the Baldwins mainly spend the long days trying to out-martyr each other.

With them live Mrs. Baldwin's wryly commonsensical niece and her husband, Anton Haider. Anton, a stocky, flat-nosed, windy introvert, commutes one day a week to Chicago for an anomalous job. His free time he spends raving against machines, brooding over his enslavement to time, denouncing the petty vanities and pretenses of the Baldwins, denouncing himself. He acts in fact like a man with a bad case of mental chicken lice. At last he announces the discovery of what is wrong with him--he has expected too much good in people. Henceforth his philosophy shall be misanthropy. "At last," he bursts out, "I'm free. At last I have peace. Humanity stinks! Humanity stinks!"

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