Good-Time Charlie

THE DAY THE MONEY STOPPED (193 pp.) --Brendan Gill--Doubleday ($2.95).

This four-character play, thinly disguised as a novel, tells the story of a prodigal but unpenitent son. Charlie Morrow, a low man on the Madison Avenue totem pole, who has "always been so ready to be rich," drives up to Connecticut in a mortgaged Cadillac to hear the reading of his father's will. In the family law office, Charlie spends an idle 15 minutes making a conquest of Ellen, a pretty secretary, a girl who proves singularly susceptible to a combination of old jokes and rueful self-pity. But after this pleasant diversion, the will is a nasty shock. Out of the million-dollar estate, Good-Time Charlie gets only a gold watch, some books and a few bottles of wine--not much use to a man who is unemployed, $12,000 in debt, and threatened with jail because of a bad check.

Charlie, however, is not without weapons. His seedy charm works its magic on his sister Kathie, and his innate dishonesty easily overcomes the commonplace virtue of his stuffy brother Richard. Within a few hours he parlays both into a $20,000 offer with more to come as he needs it. Having made his point, Charlie unconvincingly spurns the money. On this framework, Author (The Trouble of One House) and New Yorker Critic Brendan Gill hangs a morality tale. It boils down to the adage that appearances are deceiving. Charlie, with all his faults, has the courage to look coolly and calmly at Life. Richard, despite all his probity, is frightened of Truth. When Charlie suggests that their revered father drove his wife to suicide and fathered an illegitimate child (Ellen, the girl in the outer office), brother Richard and sister Kathie cry him down, not because they doubt what he says, but because it would be too agonizing to change the image of their father and, more important, of themselves.

In crisp, dialogue-filled pages. Author Gill has drawn a recognizable portrait of a fast-talking, flip and money-hungry operator, but when he reaches for a deeper meaning in Charlie's woes, he reaches into emptiness. As a novel or play, the book must stand in the shadow of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, since both take the rigid form of a one-day revelation of a family's sins and strength. But here is no passionate view of the tragedy of life: easy optimism and shallow hope bubble up from every line, and the moral is simply a wisecrack-coated placebo that goes down without effort and is guaranteed against causing distress.

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