Books: Tracing-Paper Realism

One big branch of U.S. writing is tracing-paper realism. Like sidewalk portrait artists, its practitioners offer a quick, literal sketch drawn from life, but only superficially true to it. Two samples:

Easy Payments, by Ray Doyle (Hermitage; $3), is a soap operetta, and its refrain is that a loan collector’s lot is not an easy one. With a baby on the way and a stack of unpaid bills, sobersided Dan Cantrell cannot bechoosy about his work. His job as “investigator” for the Trustee Personal Finance Co. is to hound the “slows.” He soon finds that the slows’ lot is not a happy one, either. Families live in crowded walk-ups where dank, paintless walls “shed their plaster skin revealing the ribs of lath.” Unkempt women in faded dressing gowns are readier with a pound of flesh than a $5 payment. Industrious Dan cannot remain stony before genuine hardship, eventually decides he has had enough of the “easy payment” world. Author Doyle, a credit manager in his nonwriting hours, writes like a man who knows his subject even when he does not know quite what to do with it.

Smashup, by Theodore Pratt (Gold Medal; paperbound. 25¢). is a graphic reminder to drive carefully even when the life you save may not be your own. On the highways of a town called Center City, one car plows into another at 50 miles an hour. Score: one dead, one severely injured. The guilty party, a 200-lb., iron-willed matron, promptly sues the other driver (a young millionaire) for $300,000 on grounds that disfiguring injuries have ruined her daughter’s budding career as a beauty queen and TV star. But two unexpected witnesses make depositions to set things right. Author Pratt lays on the human gore and displays a nice nose for human greed—shyster lawyers, crooked photographers and assorted vultures circling a big cash settlement. Probably the most absorbing safety lecture since J.C. Furnas’—And Sudden Death.