A Rock in Every Snowball

IN ARock in Every Snowball, Frank Sullivan lets fling at everything from Van Wyck Brooks’ weakness for the footnote to Gloria Swanson’s taste in hats, taking pot shots along the way at pigeons and drum majorettes, both of which irritate him, and reserving special aim for soap operas, which he hits square in their aching middle. His favorite target, however, is the hackneyed phrase, and we have the cliché expert, Mr. Arbuthnot, relentlessly coming forth with all the cliches that have ever been used about such subjects as politics, the Christmas Season, ill-health, and atomic energy. (“Q — Could the atomic age have arrived by means of any other verb than ‘usher’? A — No. ‘Usher’ has the priority.”) Legal jargon suffers in a polysyllabic sketch, and sports writing is given its due in a piece called “Football Is King.”

Mr. Sullivan rests his good right arm (Ah, there, Mr. Arbuthnot!) in a few sketches of reminiscence — the custom of barbers in times past to hold a mirror to the back of the head after cutting the hair, and the charms of various New York speakeasies in the days of Prohibition. He pauses, too, to hold a brief for the pleasures of a holiday spent in New York when everyone is out of town, and to tackle the problem of the leaking sandwich. But in no time at all he is back in there again, aiming at clichés on the air and the failure of hair-oil companies to give men the lift in their advertising that the perfume companies offer women.

Those sketches read better when taken singly — they were originally published as separate pieces in magazines —for, as with all collections of humorous pieces, uninterrupted reading makes for a sense of strain in the humor. A Rock in Every Snowball is a good bet, however, for the train trip, the bedside, and, unexpectedly enough, by virtue of its merciless exposé of the cliché, for the classroom.

W. L. COPITHORNE