THE OLD BUNCH — Meyer Levin — Viking ($3).
U. S. readers have lately had their work cut out for them. Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse, Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind have all been of approximately 1,000-page length. Last week Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (964 pages) gave wrist-weary readers another hefty handful. Aside from actual weight, however, The Old Bunch has less in common with its swollen sisters than with such half-starved gutter rats as James Farrell's Studs Lonigan. Realism of the cheapest dye, Author Levin's tale of Jews in Chicago is not so much a chronicle as chronic narrative. Gentile readers (goyische Lezer to Author Levin) may find themselves oppressed at times by the heavy, strident Jewishness of the book's atmosphere, but once under way most of them will be carried along by the momentum of the year's most naturalistic novel. After a hasty checkup, statisticians last week agreed that Author Levin had succeeded in printing twice as many four-letter unprintables as his nearest competitor to date.
Like John Dos Passes' trilogy, The Old Bunch is punctuated and underlined by scraps of current popular songs, but the background (Chicago from 1921 to 1934) is integrated with the story. Some of the 20-odd main characters wander to Manhattan, Paris, Palestine, Greece, Poland, but the principal focus is on Chicago and "the bunch'' as they grew up there. "The bunch," high-school age in 1921, were second-generation Russian Jews. Few of their immigrant fathers were well off; most of them were buttonhole makers, shoemakers, pawnbrokers, barbers, cigar-makers. Most of the mothers still spoke Yiddish.
Some of the bunch were consciously ambitious, felt themselves capable of big things; all of them were determined to do better for themselves than their parents had. Their tastes soon began to differentiate them. Runt Plotkin, toughest of the crowd, embarrassed them by his actions with girls, which spoke louder than their lewd chatter. He drifted off to become a precocious hack-driver. First of the bunch to go further than the universally-allowed petting were Estelle and Sol, the chesty athlete. That went on till they got a scare, then they broke up.