Books: Tin Lizzie

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AMERICAN CHROME by Edwin Gilbert. 448 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Conspiracy is afoot. Clearly, the writers of the big bad sub-novels have secretly banded together, in the interest of economy, to pool their characters. The same people with the same names keep popping up.

Consider Tony: within a month he appears in Author Gilbert's big bad book about the auto business in Detroit and in another novel about the same thing, John Quirk's The Hard Winners. In both books, Tony is the handsome, talented but weak vice president who aspires to the top spot in the corporation but is blackmailed and loses out because he is a corrupt womanizer. Then there's Ann. She has grown up from the plain good girl of bad novels published several seasons back and become the lovely, sexy girl Author Gilbert shows her to be today. Daringly, he makes her rich, too. But the reader can be sure that the girl named Ann is still good at heart.

The fellow to watch out for is Scott. Only last summer Scott was the dashing, heroic flyer in Leon Uris' sweaty saga about the Berlin airlift. Now here he is again, successfully making the transition to civilian life as an idealistic, heroic young automotive executive. His battles in Detroit, working for Author Gilbert, are as simple as when Uris used him in Berlin. He fights for honest salesmanship and for improvements in the product. He indignantly opposes a loudmouthed supplier who is bribing and blackmailing Tony. At the end it looks very much as though Scott will marry Ann.

Better writers than Gilbert have tried and failed to create the big good novel about American business. Stereotyped characters are only a part of the problem. The real obstacle is that novelists rarely know corporation life. They have trouble giving their characters meaningful work to do at their jobs. They have no idea of the subtle moral dilemmas the business organization can thrust at a man. Therefore the novelists fall back on bribery and sexual pandering, though these blatant corruptions are 1) unconvincing on realistic grounds because they occur only in a few grubby corners of the business world, and 2) uninteresting on fictional grounds because nobody concerned has any doubt of their immorality.

When the psychological turning point of an ambitious epic of business is the moment when the hero refuses to let the corrupt supplier pay for his call girl —by golly, he'll pay his own way—the effect is not only meretricious but laughable.