Books: Agrarian Idyl

THE PLATINUM TOWER—Jerome Bahr—Scribner ($2).

Onetime traveler with a medicine show, manager of ham boxers, ex-reporter, graduate of the University of Wisconsin and protege of Ernest Hemingway, lanky, blond, 28-year-old Jerome Bahr two years ago published his first book, a volume of short stories called All Good Americans. In one of his rare prefaces, Hemingway vouched for "their solid, youthful worth, their irony, their humor, their peasant lustiness," predicted that Jerome Bahr "will write a fine novel eventually."

The Platinum Tower cannot be called the predicted "fine novel"—it is hardly a novel at...