Image of a City

SOMETHING OF A HERO--I. J. Kapsfeln --Knopf ($2.75).

Israel James Kapstein (Brown '26), undergraduate friend of pinwheel-minded S. J. Perelman and the late brilliant Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), went back to Brown in 1927, has taught English there ever since. Although he publishes his first novel at the dangerously retarded age of 37, it is a good one.

Its subject is ambitious: the U.S. It is handled in terms of some 20 characters who bracket among them the main classes, forces and stresses in the life of an average U.S. city. These characters are observed in three phases of civic optimism (July 4, 1907, 1917, 1929), and in three phases of panic (1907, the immediate postwar,

1930).

Their center is honest, confused Civil War Veteran John Cantrell who presumably represents the American character at its best. Flanking him are his good Socialist friend Marius Schaeffer and his cousin Harvey, a banker and industrialist. Other characters represent law and politics, the white-collar class, the racial minorities, the workers, the easy-money and criminal fringe.

They are warmly and well drawn, so adeptly organized that for 596 pages they move almost as actively as a play. But unluckily Kapstein is so intensely concerned with them as social symbols that they sometimes wear their humanity like false beards, and the play becomes a pageant. Yet the total effect is a massive, honest, compassionate and convincing image of a community.

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