Two Underdogs
Richard, Jerry
Two Underdogs Made In U.S.A., by Alfred Kern. Houghton Mifflin Co. 369 pp. $4.95. Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter. Harcourt, Brace and World. 308 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Jerry Richard *???...
...In Kern's comparison of style and attitude in the old line labor leaders and their smooth successors, the two types are kept so separate that no interesting clash is ever recorded...
...The most interesting is an exploration, not done in enough depth, of how innocent we are of our own corruption...
...The old district director, Hamner's mentor, is one of the original organizers of the union...
...the other is defeated by failure...
...The book is as exciting as cheap sex, homosexuality, petty crime, and violence can make it, but good stories are passed by as whole lives are narrated instead of dramatized...
...From the respectability of second generation labor leadership, he is plunged back into the raw world of the small mill towns in western Pennsylvania...
...The overall impression Kern apparently wants to give is that organizations, like colleges and unions, can turn out people the way machines turn out products, with a built-in obsolescence...
...Yet if this indicates a fierce desire to write, there may be more promise here than in Made in U.S.A...
...The material of Alfred Kern's book seems curiously dated, as if the life of the western Pennsylvania mill towns got stuck in the '30s...
...This is played out twice— once in the comparison between Ham-ner's treatment of the gamblers whom he dismisses from the union and a loyal friend whom he keeps in his post even when he discovers that the friend had been taking bribes...
...Hamner does not see the irony...
...Made in U.S.A...
...The book is rich and intricate, so much so that its hero is kept too busy for the story to explore any of its elements in enough depth to make it convincing or meaningful in any but ironic fashion...
...It is a tough world...
...One learns about the world of union politics, but despite the sociology and an occasionally compelling plot, one does not learn just what there might be in America that stamps its union leaders and professors Made in U.S.A...
...he asks the professor to get his son in, and he does...
...Alfred Kern gives the impression of having exhausted his material in his first novel...
...Hamner's son has not been accepted at the college...
...There are several themes in Kern's novel...
...Kern obviously knows his material, but too often he lets his story become an illustration for his text...
...One of them is defeated by success...
...The failure of this novel is in part a failure to locate anything more valid or dramatically interesting to pit its underdog against than a crooked wheel of fortune...
...Without anything meaningful for its author to explore and its hero to contend with, Hard Rain Falling inevitably becomes a picaresque tale, but it is impossible to sustain interest in a series of incidents unless they are illuminated by insights and a perspective...
...More subtle is his use of an old friend, an economics professor at a nearby college...
...Don Carpenter seems not even to have discovered his yet...
...by Alfred Kern is the story of Steve Hamner, who worked his way up from iron mill worker to labor leader...
...The professor, a former friend of labor, has accepted a chair endowed by one of the mill owners...
...As assistant to the president of the "United Ore and Metal Workers of America" he is enjoying the affluent and powerful world of organized labor at the national and international level when the dying leader of his old district calls him back...
...Before Hamner accuses him of selling out, he asks a favor...
...In Don Carpenter's first novel, Hard Rain Falling, despite its modern frankness in its treatment of sex and its free use of obscenity, its style and attitude place it firmly in the naturalistic tradition that died out in the early decades of this century...
...And Kern, especially in the first half, cannot keep himself from commenting on what is happening, until the reader begins to feel that he is observing the story over the author's shoulder...
...The only way back up for Hamner is to win the district directorship against the candidacies of local leaders who did not go on to Pittsburgh and Washington...
...This author is sitting on your lap, shouting in your ear...
...protagonists of both these first novels are underdogs...
...he also works informally for the mill owner in trying to make Hamner the goat for the plant closing...
...Here is no looking over the author's shoulder...
Vol. 30 • July 1966 • No. 7
