Books: Good-Time Charlie

THE DAY THE MONEY STOPPED (193 pp.) —Brendan Gill—Doubleday ($2.95).

This four-character play, thinly disguised as a novel, tells the story of a prodigal but unpenitent son. Charlie Morrow, a low man on the Madison Avenue totem pole, who has "always been so ready to be rich," drives up to Connecticut in a mortgaged Cadillac to hear the reading of his father's will. In the family law office, Charlie spends an idle 15 minutes making a conquest of Ellen, a pretty secretary, a girl who proves singularly susceptible to a combination of old jokes and rueful self-pity. But after this pleasant...