Out of the Slime

JOB'S HOUSE--Caroline Slade--Vanguard ($2.50).

Job Mann, as his name suggests, is a patient, courageous believer buffeted by an angry sea of unbelief, a symbol of the rocky virtues that keep man's head above water. Life for Job and his wife, Katie, has been secure and happy until age, illness and the Great Depression force them to apply for "public assistance." Thence he is plunged into a world he never knew --a world of hate, whores, idiots, stinking tenements and the loathed "Welfares." It is a world well known to Caroline Slade. When her mother read a preceding novel, The Triumph of Willie Pond, she wrote to her daughter: "Caroline, wherever in the world did you hear such language?" For years Caroline has been a social worker, has more understanding of the Bowery bum than respect for her bureaucratic colleagues who speak of the poor as "cases." She has seen the same economic underworld that preoccupied Farrell, Steinbeck, Dos Passes. But it has whetted, not dulled, her faith in man's ability to conquer his environment.

Consequently her Job Mann is an even more resolute character than Ma Joad Determined to pull himself and his companions up from slime, malnutrition and poverty, he succeeds. If she sometimes belabors a point, ofttimes overwrites, Author Slade nevertheless carries her thesis --a quotation from her lawyer-husband, John A. Slade: "It is strange how most of us go through life, knowing so little about it, nourished on vague hopes, half-beliefs, and repressions . . .; in a crisis, it may be that only those who are capable of deliberate choice and planning shall survive."

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