Muddle

STACY--Alexander Black -- Bobbs-Merrill ($2.00). The walls were not very thick where Stacy lived. Upstairs lived a female person whom he could hear walking, thud, thud, like a shod horse, endlessly to and fro, putting away her laundry out of a package --a year's wash, perhaps. Downstairs in the basement there were two other people--a man named Barrack and a girl he had taken in. This girl had been on the town, but she was pretty. Stacy fell in love with her, fell also for the shod horse abovestairs. He knew his oats, he knew the big-town song-and-dance, the Broadway poker-game; but love was a word he believed in. He put a wallop in that word, but was leery of saying so in gabfests, because most "gogetters" thought it was hokum, and he was a go-getter. "Big money" was what he wanted. He got a job promoting Sawkin's Hair Salvation, gave it up, started a hash-house. Sometimes he was up, sometimes he was down, always he was lonely, always there were the women. Mr. Black must have known a lot of Stacys; he makes this one significant because he is almost perfectly average. If too many klaxons blow in this book, if people seem to skid into each other's lives, trip each other up, like passengers at a slippery crossing, it is because the life Mr. Black has chosen to observe is like that; people are hatched too fast, buildings rise too quickly, traffic is hard to handle, walls are not very thick.