Union Square

[Viking Press, $2.50]

DOWN where Broadway crosses Fourteenth Street, New York’s ghetto has a little garden suburb known as Union Square. Its soap boxes and open-air forums are the city’s safety valve, a rude reminder to patrician Stuyvesant Square that three blocks below are sweatshops and hunger and below-sidewalk retreats where Revolution is plotted ceaselessly,

Mr. Halper, a new writer, has adapted for his book the familiar formula revitalized by Vicki Baum in Grand Hotel. It radiates from a cheap walk-up apartment, '20 Door City.’ It’s all about the People, and thirdfloor-back drinkers and lovers; and always the Party, a parade of disillusioned immigres. ’Why don’t you go back where you come from?’ some shillalah bearer from the Old Sod is forever taunting them. And in the ensuing riots that both sides somehow seem to welcome, Mr. Halper tells us, ‘in all the husky beefsteak faces [of the cops] the red juice of life and fury was overflowing, and the communists got spattered with the gravy.’ An unpleasant story, much of it; but it rings true.

You’ll get the feel of Union Square from the book, and of its people. There’s Comrade Helen, the lovehungry viking from Texas; and Mr. Boardman, the bourgeois clutching sadly at a life beyond his depth; and Tom Austin, proud and out of a job, who got paid for his pride with the hoof of a police horse in his spine; Leon, whose faith could n’t even move a cheap blonde; and always Jason, the alcoholized dynamo who could write poetry but did write hack romance for the pulp magazines.

Union Square is the kind of story that irritates some readers, and nauseates a few; but it will never bore anyone. There’s everything in it, almost too much, and you get the feeling that young Mr. Halper’s talent is still a bit undisciplined. He is prodigal with words, overbuilds some of his effects, repeats himself. But through it all there runs a staccato vitality that gives force and meaning to his tale. In no sense is it a tract; he has viewed with rare objectivity a slice of New York life that usually betrays its reporter into prejudice.