Books: Word Desert

THE ADVERTISING MAN

by JACK DILLON

316 pages. Harper's Magazine Press.

$6.95.

If this were a polished writing job, it would be one more of those slick commercial novels about an ad agency. Instead, it is clumsy, serious and painstaking, and perhaps as a consequence, considerably more enlightening. The agency involved is called Gibbs & Wilson, and at G. & W. creativity is king, writers venerated, research unheard of. The hero is Copy Chief Jim Bower, a dour, taciturn fellow known throughout the trade for lines like (to sell a brand of vodka): "Tell your...

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