Books: Within a Tower of Junk

THE PAWNBROKER (279 pp.)—Edward Lewis Wallant—Harcourt, Brace & World ($4.50).

Any man who runs a third-rate hock shop can be excused for taking a crabbed view of humanity. To his barred window, clutching their appalling array of tattered goods, come junkies, alkies, homosexuals, whores and pimps, as well as the faceless poor. Reflecting on his part in these endless, trivial transactions. Sol Nazerman, the Harlem pawnbroker, "became filled with the idea that he was building a tower of junk, struggling and draining himself to amass nothing . . . For him the core of life was there in all its reality: brutal,...