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The dust jacket reproduces part of a mural by Thomas Hart Benton: City Activities with Subway. A woman stands while four men sit, ignoring her. One reads a tabloid whose back-page headline blares: BANKER'S LOVE NEST. What is wrong with this picture? The paper, of course: the last page of a tabloid always reports sports; it is the front page that broadcasts scandal. This quirky distortion of actuality echoes the work within. Ilka Weissnix is a Viennese greenhorn entering post-World War II America with a few sentences of English, an open face and beautiful legs. She soon encounters Carter Bayoux, a < doomed journalist with several distinguishing characteristics: he is overweight, brilliant, alcoholic and black.
This volatile mixture forms the substance of tragicomedy and fills it with asides that are, like the tabloid, just slightly askew: " 'My ex-wife . . . was a bitch.' Ilka thought that's what she wanted to be--a bitch and a looker. Think of the opportunities!" The voluble, repetitious Bayoux cannot match her lunatic poignancy, but he can be an apt foil and in the end helps to prove that the immigrant novel, from Henry Roth's Call It Sleep to Isaac Bashevis Singer's Lost in America to Lore Segal's Her First American, remains inexhaustible.