Books: Broadway Blinkers

THE YOUNG LIONS (689 pp.)—Irwin Shaw—Random House ($3.95).

Before the war, Irwin Shaw won easy fame and money by turning out smooth and clever plays and stories—for many tastes, rather too smooth and clever. Now, with his war experience to draw upon, Shaw has thrown all his energy and talent into an ambitious novel. As one of the Broadway characters of a Shaw story might say, this is his “big pitch.” The sad news is that he has failed; his novel is depressing evidence of how hard it is for a writer to slough off youthful habits.

Shaw’s novel has three interweaving plots. Christian Diestl is an Austrian would-be superman who tolerates his Nazi party comrades since they are useful for world conquest; Michael Whitacre is a Broadway character worried about the sordid emptiness of his life; Noah Ackerman is a young Jewish boy confused by modern life but determined to burst through to personal fulfillment.

Caught up in the war, each reacts according to his mold. Diestl is caught in the barbarism and demoralization of the Nazi army. Whitacre gets hold of himself by learning the values of sacrifice in a common, just cause. And Ackerman emerges from a harrowing ordeal of anti-Semitic persecution in an Army camp to become the ideal democratic soldier: thoughtful, selfless, heroic.

One trouble with The Young Lions is that, though Shaw has planned a large narrative structure, his novel often crumbles into unintegrated sketches. Many of these are good, especially at suggesting the drab atmospheres of Army camps, but many others become preachy and dreadfully sentimental. What is worst about his writing is that he has uncertain taste; he never knows when to stop. He begins with a moving description of Noah’s pain at coming across anti-Semitism in the army and then collapses into a completely incredible bit of hocus-pocus in which Noah fights ten big soldiers, one by one, gets beaten up and sent to the hospital and is never helped by any officer in the Army camp. While there was anti-Semitism in the Army, it never resembled Shaw’s paranoiac version of it. A good, calloused editor would have helped Shaw a lot.

Shaw seems to have absorbed too much of the attitude to life and the feeling for language of the very Broadway characters he has described in his own stories: “And now he’s standing here in a blue suit like a truckdriver at his own wedding, rattling the ice cubes in his drink, with people talking about the last picture they made and what the critics said and what the doctors thought about the baby’s habit of sleeping with his fist in his eyes, and a man with a guitar singing fake Southern ballads . . . and the magenta girl with three breasts over the bar.”