Ike-o and the Easy Way

...Ike-o learned the ways of his world early...

...Still, better to read the first novel of a writer with heart and mind who is on his way up than the umpteenth book by someone who speaks more smoothly only because he is trying to say less...

...When Ike-o at first had refused on the grounds it would be stealing, Charlie had hit him and told him to mind his father...

...He was the last dregs of a family that could be traced back to Revolutionary War days, a fact he delighted in throwing at the Negroes, Jews and Poles who surrounded him...

...He learned how to take and how one got taken...

...no fist-shaking at society and nameless villains in the old tradition, and no mindless juvenile crime in the newer idiom...

...Goran sketches too rapidly where he should be filling in the details of his portraits...

...Goran writes more skilfully than the old-school naturalists and more thoughtfully and poetically than the new-school sociologists...

...What process turns Ike-o from a promising soldier into a malingerer...

...Goran is not offering the easy answer that a poor slob should be pitied and forgiven because life made him that way...

...Charlie was a little, fat man whose dreams could no longer stir him into useful activity but only raised in him a thirst for whiskey...

...But the Catfish, who got Ike-o into his first trouble with the police and, at the end of the book gives the ex-soldier the only sensible advice he has ever received, remains an outline instead of a character...

...The fact that the author can suggest much so briefly, and leave the reader wanting to know what has been left out, is a tribute to his skill...

...He learned how to get through school the easy way, and how to get out of the Army the slightly harder way...

...He learned the former as Charlie dragged him along on his rounds and the latter as soon as he got old enough to look on his own...

...Ike-o was born in 1931, his natal place the tenement toilet two flights below the apartment occupied by his parents...

...Before the boy was in his teens he knew all the neighborhood dives where cheap whiskey was sold and all the neighborhood houses where slightly more expensive love was sold...

...But Goran occasionally writes as if he knew so well what he meant to say that it got written in his mind and never transferred to paper...

...He learned that a smart guy always had the odds working for him...

...A man can still reach toward his own redemption and shape it with his own hands...

...The night Ike-o was midwifed into the world by a neighbor, Charlie took the six dollars and 13 cents that the tenants chipped in to celebrate the event and disappeared on a three-week bender...

...He knows, too, that Ike-o Hartwell is more than a reflex reacting to his environment...

...Compared to most of the summer novels that were published in the weeks before and after Lester Goran's first novel appeared last July, his book is still worth talking about in the fall...

...Reviewed by Bernard Roshco Contributor, New York "Times Magazine," "Coronet," "Today's Living" The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue is a good working draft of the novel it never quite became...

...Yolanda was very quiet, not very bright, a woman who hardly stirred from her seat in the kitchen, but whose decencies and love for Charlie Hartwell had not been buried beneath the 200 pounds she now bore on her frame...

...What makes him unable to hold onto his chance to make a life with Dolly...

...This is not, however, a standard slum novel...

...When the boy was seven, Charlie Hartwell and his sometime-buddy-sometime-bitterest-enemy, Fats Smolcher, got him to climb through a back window and lift four pints of moonshine from DeAngelo's saloon...

...He is still only 21 and, as Gedunsky tells him: "Everybody got a chance, once a day, in the morning...

...Goran can get you interested in the minor characters that flit by, such as 0. C. "Catfish" Gedunsky, the local wardheeler who is put out of business as the slum neighborhood, in which he bought votes in exchange for the life-saving favors a slum dweller needs, is about to be torn down...

...He knows how Sobaski's Stairway looks and smells...

...At the end Ike-o clears part of his slate with an act as crude in execution as it is at least decent in intention...

...Ike-o Hartwell was the only child of Charles and Yolanda Hartwell...

...The paratrooper is Isaac, better known as "Ike-o," Hartwell...

...Mechanic Avenue runs through So-baski's Stairway, a Pittsburgh tenement district that is a melange of races, hatreds, frustrations, and the grimy pleasures with which life's tensions are forgotten for a few moments...

...He makes Ike-o's outer world abundantly clear, but he only sketches the inner world, and this is the heart of his failure...

...This is almost a cruel summary, because it leaves the reader with the impression that the author has achieved less than was actually accomplished...

...Ike-o became a paratrooper by grace of the boots he bought in a Baltimore pawnshop on his way home from an Army mental hospital and a dishonorable discharge that kept him out of Korea...

...Unfortunately, however, with not quite enough thought and not quite enough skill to make his book what he wanted it to be...

...From then on, Ike-o picked up his lessons quickly...

...No sexy set-pieces...

...Readers interested in watching what a fresh eye and a fresh talent can do with a milieu that other writers might seem to have used up should give Goran a few hours of their time...

...Pleased with what has been offered, the reader wants more than is there...

...He knows how the people who live there talk...

...When he was drunk, he especially liked to remind Yolanda, who was Polish...

...Summed up this way, Goran's book tends to seem like many other slum-boy stories—updated as far as the Korean War...

...This produces the jumpy spots and the murky touches in a prose that is usually clear, swift and well-turned...

...He learned how to get the most out of his narrow world in exchange for as little as possible...

...He returned to Sobaski's Stairway to find that Dolly Smolcher had kept her promise to love him, but not her promise to wait only for him...