Books: The Self-Deluders

'OF STREETS AND STARS (306 pp.)—Alan Marcus—Houghton Mifflin ($4.50).

"At 30," says Alan Marcus, "I had no agent, I had no publisher. But I knew I was a writer." A lot of other young men of 30 know the same thing—but Marcus, it appears, was right. He is now 40, and he has spent much of the intervening decade trying to peddle his second novel to a publisher. It is everybody's good luck that he succeeded.

Of Streets and Stars is no conventional novel. It has practically no plot; it poses no dramatic questions and summons...