Round and Round

By John Skow

Round and Round WHEELS by Arthur Hailey. 374 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

Arthur Hailey writes holding-pattern prose. He advances one of his homunculi three-and-a-half pages toward ruin, then puts him in a holding pattern and moves some other character a totter or two toward temptation. But just before the dread jaws of fee-fi-fo-fum snap shut, there is another shift of attention, and the reader must tremble in behalf of a third wretch who has been circling perdition for two chapters, waiting for permission to land.

In the hands of a lesser romancer, the damaged elevator that dangled so defectively in Hotel might have fallen in the first chapter, or not at all. Hailey brought it out of its holding pattern at exactly the right moment, a dozen pages before the end, and all of the plot elements fell into place: splat. Thus the reader is only mildly alarmed when, after several chapters of Wheels, Hailey's new novel about the auto industry, the president of General Motors has not reappeared. He was there on the first page, sleepy and cross because a defective electric blanket had given him a bad night. He tinkered with the blanket, fixed it, and drove out of sight in his Cadillac, headed for work. Trivial stuff, apparently, but the practiced Hailey reader knows that it may be important. In good time, surely, the author will reveal whether excessive G forces on the freeway caused the Cadillac's power ashtrays to malfunction, catalyzing a shake-up in G.M.'s ashtray division, or whether it was the electric blanket that turned savage later that day, grilling the G.M. president in a waffle pattern and creating a top-level vacancy for that bright young product-development exec, Adam Trenton.

Wobbling Plot. What plot there is in Wheels wobbles around the question of whether the "clean-cut and alert" Trenton can accept the ethics of the auto industry and whether he will open his blue eyes in time to see that he has been neglecting his wife, passionate and unfulfilled Erica. It is usually said of Hailey that he does considerable research and gives his readers a lot of interesting information about, for instance, airports or hotels. This time he has not come up with much. Auto workers shoot H on company time, the reader learns. Never buy a car produced on Monday or Friday (an old counsel) because assembly-line absenteeism on those days results in sloppy work. Auto dealers are sly fellows. Industry executives do not unanimously approve of Ralph Nader. What Hailey neglects to use is astonishing: there is no union bargaining session, no Senate committee meeting, no sense of the deep, cold currents of power in Grosse Pointe. Moreover, the sleepy president of G.M. is not heard from after page 3.

This is bad Hailey--whatever good Hailey may be.

"I pick an idea that enthuses me. I discuss it with Doubleday and with my wife Sheila. Then I take a year finding out in some depth about the people and the organization." The voice belongs to Author Arthur Hailey, 51, summing up the techniques that have earned him an honest million or more in the past dozen years, since he switched first from a job as a low-echelon executive in Toronto to TV writing, and then to blockbuster fiction.

Hailey followed the same methods in preparing Wheels. He was wined and dined by the auto industry, observed everything and interviewed everyone from assembly-line workers to G.M. President Edward Cole. Each night he dictated thousands of words to a tape recorder for a secretary to type up afterward. With research in hand, he laboriously plotted and worked up minibiographies of various characters, to be consulted when he got down to the actual writing.

In Wheels, Hailey knows (and shows) as much about Detroit as he ever did about hotels and airports. But the automobile industry has been so much in the public eye and conscience lately that Hailey's disclosures do not seem particularly new or revealing. To some tastes they will not seem damning enough either, but grumblings from Detroit indicate that the industry feels Hailey has been not entirely kind in returning the city's hospitality.

It is not that the book is a scandalous roman a clef. Detroiters agree that Hailey has skillfully put together his personalities as composites, as one might assemble a car with a fender from Ford, a Chrysler steering column and G.M. accessories. What seems to trouble Detroit is Hailey's assertion that assembly-line workers do not like their jobs, and the book's heavy emphasis on styling and new-model planning. Unhappy eyebrows have been raised, too, over the inclusion of a heavy-drinking, heavy-breathing stag weekend party for automotive executives, politicians and assorted hostesses.

Hailey stands by his book, which was scaling national bestseller lists less than a week after publication. After Airport he had enough money never to work again, but he is now thinking hard about his next subject. His publisher decided that Hailey's first choice, a big university, would not be fresh enough just now. Another project, the secret life of a large symphony orchestra, seemed too narrow. So Hailey is plunging into research on the great world of finance. The book's title, at least, is already out of the way. It will be Money.

. John Skow

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