THE PHEASANT-LINED OF CHARLIE FREEMAN
By
About once a year, if you're lucky, there's a young, fresh novel with a lot of high phosphate humor (1965-James Leigh's What Can You Do? ; 1966-William Richert's Aren't You Even Gonna Kiss Me Good-By?) and this one's about Charlie Freeman, via Boston, Harvard, and the Army on Wall Street as a trainee (""preparing to be something I never had any idea of being.""). He's got a button-down collar right underneath that unbuttoned lip, and he really doesn't belong there (that ghastly new equality when it doesn't matter if you went to St. Paul's or Bronx High) and he's lonesome in his cheap residential hotel (hot plates and roaches). Not too much happens but there are a lot of funny scenes from Chock Full O'Nuts to the Village to a weekend at Cambridge, before he decides to go back to graduate school....It probably won't make the Big Boards but it's a high flyer.