Books: Which Snake Pit?

THE BRAIN PICKERS (319 pp.)—Hallie Burnett—Messner ($3.95).

“The novel the whole publishing world is buzzing about! . . . Exposes the commercial snake pit of the book world where power-hungry men and love-hungry women struggle for survival and fulfillment.” So say the ads. Actually, The Brain Pickers is a shoddy novel by Hallie Burnett, wife of Author Whit Burnett, that reveals very little about the publishing business, although it may start a sort of human Tangle Towns contest as to the possible identity of its leading, characters.

Kevin Roller is a fat, lowborn lecher who has piled up a smelly fortune publishing obscene comic books and now has bought into the respectable but slipping Primrose Press. Is there a Kevin Roller on Manhattan’s publishers’ row? He is, at worst, a composite: traits of his career can be spotted in several existing New York publishing firms. Similarly, Tony Thompson—the passionate editor with a winetaster’s nose for genius and a mixed-up love life—recalls bits and pieces of several real-life editors’ personal histories. The same goes for Gerald Primrose, who has inherited Primrose Press, but who is in no sense much of a man and knows very well that publishing is not his game. The plot concerns a young novelist who has concocted a piece of what Gerald calls “illiterate trash,” which somehow brings tragedy to the three publishing types—Gerald goes over the deep end dressed in a girl’s frock; Tony dies of what must be diagnosed as a continuing beating administered by life; and Kevin loses control of the Primrose Press. Only the young novelist comes out all right: he gets the girl, his book is snapped up by Doubleday and a book club, and should do extremely well in soft-cover editions.

Author Burnett rigs out her scene with a few publishers’ parties, but her ear is not very sensitive to what goes on at such shindigs. Nothing The Brain Pickers says about the U.S. publishing business is as damaging to it as the fact that this book found a publisher at all.