Books: The Hero as Businessman

THE MAGICIANS (246 pp.) — J.B.

Priestley—Harper ($3).

THE POWER AND THE PRIZE (326 pp.)—Howard Swiggett—Ballantine ($3.50).

The businessman in the fiction of the '20s and '30s not merely seemed a boor and a menace: he was scarcely a real human being. He was a full-time symbol, unable to buy a new necktie without illustrating "conspicuous consumption,'' or to fall in love without serving as a comment on "bourgeois morality." But in recent years, the businessman has been emerging as a human and something of a hero. The trend seems transatlantic. In the past year Britain's Nigel Balchin published Private Interests and in 1952...