Books: Image of a City

SOMETHING OF A HERO—I. J. Kapsfeln —Knopf ($2.75).

Israel James Kapstein (Brown '26), undergraduate friend of pinwheel-minded S. J. Perelman and the late brilliant Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), went back to Brown in 1927, has taught English there ever since. Although he publishes his first novel at the dangerously retarded age of 37, it is a good one.

Its subject is ambitious: the U.S. It is handled in terms of some 20 characters who bracket among them the main classes, forces and stresses in the life of an average U.S. city. These...