In the Jungles of Brooklyn

...and Shorty, an unsuccessful lecher...

...Roth's book was successfully reissued last year, and now Basic Books has brought out a one-volume edition of all of Fuchs (Three Novels by Daniel Fuchs, 986 pp., $7.95...

...Instead, as he tells us proudly in the preface to Three Novels, he gave up, and quit his fourth novel in the middle...

...Max sees him as "a great man," "Tamburlaine in New York," a symbol of "high-handed adventure," and attends his funeral as an act of homage...

...Karty is beaten almost to death by his brothersin-law for embezzling their money and losing it on the horses...

...It is a remote and archaic past that comes to life again in these pages...

...Moe Karty, a compulsive horseplayer...

...Cohen's misadventures and Papravel's bland piety are quite funny, the Lirick households are convincingly sordid, Philip's fumblings at life are often moving, but somehow it all never comes together in the synthesis and enlightenment Fuchs means to produce...

...Max Balkan, who aspires to Renaissance grandeur and hopes to achieve it by selling revolutionary ideas to industry, and his sister Rita's fiancé, Mendel Munves, an amateur etymologist who aspires to a life of dedicated scholarship, are reconciled at the book's end to the realities of life in Williamsburg, marriage and a partnership in a delicatessen...

...It is all given a mild social significance: Cohen falls into Communist party circles as briefly and senselessly as he falls into the East River, and Papravel defends himself and his mobsters as just another small business trying to make a living...

...Miller says: "If you would really discover the reason, you must pick Williamsburg to pieces until you have them all spread out on your table before you, a dictionary of Williamsburg...

...The book ends on Papravel's joy at his business success, but nothing else is resolved, certainly not Sussman's suicide...

...In the course of the novel's action the gangsters almost kill Shubunka and drive him out of town...

...These novels are better written, if less ambitious and "serious," than Call It Sleep, and very well worth reading...

...It is a world drenched in sex, but it has surprisingly little joy...

...and many others...

...He is best when he is most bold and imaginative, most garish and grotesque: the guinea pigs, Blenholt's funeral, the death of Spitzbergen...

...The question of whether he ever really had the talent to be a major novelist remains unanswered...

...The image of Williamsburg life that the reader takes away from the novel is a vision of the guinea pigs who roam the floor of the filthy Linck apartment, nibbling at dropped food and scurrying with fright at every shouted curse...

...Its gangsters remain unconvincing figures who say, "If you give us ten thousand dollars we will do to the other fellow as we were supposed to do to you," but now they are ominous...

...For all the violence and horror, the only gain is Lurie's perception: "Lurie knew now that it had been insensible and inhuman for him, too, simply to hate Neptune and seek escape from it...

...More sharply than Papravel and his mob, they are designed to symbolize capitalism...

...But Fuchs is not really in the naturalistic tradition of Michael Gold's Jews Without Money, nor do his novels "do for Jewish life in Brooklyn in the 1930s," as the jacket foolishly suggests, "what James T. Farrell did for the Irish of Chicago in his Studs Lonigan trilogy...

...What remains in the reader's mind from Low Company are two authentically chilling scenes, the brilliantly lit, deserted boardwalk as Shubunka flees the killers, and the nightmarish, slobbering death-struggle of Karty and Spitzbergen in a BMT washroom...

...Pick and discard...

...In a savage comic scene, the funeral turns into a riot in which Max gets trampled and his glasses are broken...

...They sold 400, 400 and 1,200 copies respectively, but a few people knew and valued them, and a small Fuchs cult has developed over the years...

...The book's final reconciliation with the world's demands is foreshadowed in its early pages, when Max sees a fantastic figure walking down the street, and it turns out to be two pregnant women walking arm in arm, a vision of his and Mendel's future...

...At other times we get something close to the travesty of "The Goldbergs," with Mrs...

...Fuchs now lives in Beverly Hills, and he won an Academy Award in 1955 for the script of Love Me or Leave Me...

...Lurie accepts human nature...

...Philip himself, involved with high-class-uptown-Yankee-Doodle Ruth and unhappily-married Tessie...

...The author answers him in the book's final line, "But all the same the evening sun that day went down on time," and we realize that we are being asked to accept the triumph of the world, the death of the dream, as natural and perhaps even as welcome...

...And then select...

...In the nearest thing to a "love story" in the novels, the courtship of Max and Ruth in Homage to Blenholt, Ruth's pretty memory is of Max fondling her breast, "playing with it like a potato pancake...

...The ultimate mood is sad reconciliation: Sam Linck's wife and mistress adjust to each other...

...The book deals with the interwoven fates of various characters who meet in Ann's soda parlor, including: Lurie, Shubunka, Louis Spitzbergen, who owns the houses Shubunka uses...

...At the end, Max's noble old father silently protests his son's surrender, thinking "that this death of youth was among the greatest tragedies in experience and that all the tears in America were not enough to bewail it...

...Philip's friend Cohen, "the poor simp,' who characteristically jumps off the Williamsburg Bridge—unsuccessfully—because he has spilled herring on a rented tuxedo...

...Collect and then analyze to understand the quality of each detail...

...This assignment becomes the novel...

...We are left with a warm domestic comedy, an earlier and more engaging Marjorie Morningstar...

...The young hero, Philip Hayman, puzzled by the suicide of a neighbor, is assigned the task of understanding by an unlikely local sage, Old Miller...

...This also was hard and ignorant, lacking human compassion...

...Fuchs was never quite bold enough, never really understood his literary heritage, never achieved a firm center for his sprawling natural history...

...Take, with intelligence you have not and with a patience that would consume a number of lifetimes, the different aspects that are pertinent...

...Fuchs' true tradition is that of Nathanael West and Henry Roth in the 30s, the symbolists and fantasists, a tradition he shares with many of the finest young writers of our time...

...The pertinent aspects of Williamsburg are: Philip's uncle Papravel, a gangster engaged in wrecking one bus service to the Catskills on behalf of another: Sam Linck, the janitress' son, a married truck driver engaged in a very messy affair with a Polish waitress...

...He had known the people at Ann's in their lowness and had been repelled by them, but now it seemed to him that he understood how their evil appeared in their impoverished dingy lives and, further, how miserable their own evil rendered them...

...These days Carmine De Sapio writes to the Times: "The employment of semantics in order to create a gratuitous dichotomy ill becomes The New York Times...

...Summer in Williamsburg, published in 1934, is the inevitable autobiographical first novel...

...In the Brooklyn jungles of Daniel Fuchs, every hoodlum and pimp, every horse-player and brothellandlord, sees himself as an honest businessman, righteously proclaiming "There is still a God over America," as he drives a competitor out of business or beats a relative unconscious...

...Low Company, published in 1937, moves from Williamsburg to Coney Island, and as an uglier gangster novel than the first, thoroughly justifies its title...

...CHRISTMAS BOOK ISSUE In the Jungles of Brooklyn By Stanley Edgar Hyman Daniel Fuchs' three novels of American Jewish life—Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt and Low Company—appeared in the 1930s, along with Henry Roth's Call It Sleep...

...and Spitzbergen is grotesquely murdered by Karty in a pathetic and ineffectual attempt at a hold-up...

...Perhaps then you might know why Sussman died, but granting everything I do not guarantee the process...

...Like it, they got lost in the swamp of proletarian literature...

...Homage to Blenholt, published in 1936, is neater...

...Herbert Lurie, who owns a dress store and is the only understanding intelligence the book has, tells Shubunka, a brothel-keeper being run out of business by the syndicate: "Business is business...

...It's the same goddammed thing in my line, only a little less lousy...

...Fuchs attempts to symbolize both the aspirations and their absurdity in the figure of Blenholt, a crooked politician who has just died...

...He decided "to become rich" instead, and took to writing for the slick magazines and "then for Hollywood...

...Balkan shouting "Mother, schmother," or instructing her daughter Rita to call a suitor who owns a meat market "darling...

...But Fuchs never wrote any more novels...

...The normal means of communication in this brutal world is cursing and screaming, in a vocabulary consisting mainly of "mean," "rotten" and "snotnose...

...His talent is considerable, and his later work might have been the triumphs that bits of these novels promise...

...Meanwhile, the tone of machine politics in New York has changed a lot since Blenholt wore a white linen suit with yellow tie and blue shirt...

...Now Williamsburg and Coney Island are full of Puerto Ricans, and if they call each other "snotnose" it is in an alien tongue...

...Lurie breaks with his fiancée after seeing her heartlessness in refusing to give Shubunka refuge...

...It was not enough to call them low and pass on...

...Shorty is beaten up by a stout Russian corsetière he has tried to rape...

...all of its strands are tied together at the end...

...Sometimes Fuchs captures a life I can remember with the relentless and embarrassing accuracy of Nichols and May, as when Philip explains to Tessie, "I feel that a funny I lives in my body...