Cheer from the Bronx

EARLY TO RISE (246 pp.)--Arnold E. Grisman--Harper ($3.50).

This is a first novel about a small New York businessman that blends folk humor with wisecrack as if Sam Levenson had had his jokes edited by George S. Kaufman. Hero Bill Roth, 23, is an ex-G.I. working for his engineering degree who lives with his parents in The Bronx. He sleeps on a sofa couch in the living room "on the main trade route from the bedroom to the bathroom." When he stays out late with girls or comes home with liquor on his breath, he is treated to his mother's virtuoso sighs: "She was a kind of Toscanini of the sigh. She ranged from a lonely flute to a sixty-mile gale."

Fed up with mamma's sighs, the sofa bed, and the kitchen-wall stains from "the smoke of a thousand lamb chops," Bill decides to quit college, quit home and go into business for himself. With Bill, venture capital is a question of whom to borrow from. Rich Uncle Simon seems a logical choice ("If you think that money isn't enough to make a person happy, you've just never met my Uncle Simon"), but Uncle Simon refuses with the reproach: "My boy, you want to learn how to shave on my beard."

Bachelor Uncle Henry ("He was like a shy volcano, boiling and boiling but afraid of boiling over") antes up $10,000, and Bill gets his start in exported dyestuffs. He operates from a loft in an egg-crate factory, and his business has more downs than ups, but Bill meets a picaresque crew of characters from mad chemists to eccentric fellow entrepreneurs to weird office help.

The dye is finally cast against him by I. G. Farben itself. At the last minute Bill tries to diversify. He fills an order for 43 plastic bathtubs made out of Volupton ("It feels like folks") for an Indian ma-harajah's palace. Poor Bill's maharajah turns out to be a telephone-booth Indian who suddenly folds his palace and silently steals away. On little elephant feet, an unfunny love interest clomps its way through the otherwise funny book. And occasionally, 37-year-old Author Grisman lets overwriting interfere with the reading. At his best, Grisman neatly catches the self-mocking nuances of Jewish-flavored humor. His spirited air of general irreverence gives Early to Rise the eloquence of a small, perfectly rendered Bronx cheer.

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