SIGNING OFF

Camera eye method applied to a cheap and flashy group of Irish-Americans, living in an urban community, and brought into focus through their connection with Sam, small-time swindler, whose death provides the motivation, slight as it is, of the story. The book has the failing of many of its genre -- there is a large cast of characters, introduced with minutia of photographic detail, and the reader loses perspective in trying to coordinate them, while the author has exhausted his own interest in the process of presenting them. As a novel, this is singularly inconclusive and unresolved, while its chief merit lies in skilled vividness of writing, evidenced in occasional flashes. Not as sordid as Steps Going Down.