HE HAD IT MADE

Al Brodie comes to Mandheim's summer hotel in the Catskills, a young man very much on the make. Wangling a job as a waiter in the hotel dining room, he proceeds, through a paradoxical combination of patent phoniness and almost unwitting integrity, to become indispensable to the social hostess, the Mandheim family,and finally, to the Mandheims' tragically widowed daughter Marsha. Along the way he has a casual affair with Ros Silver, a fellow worker, and develops a bitter enmity with the head waiter,Stan the Mong. Both these relationships complicate the course of his true love for Marsha Mandheim, which nevertheless triumphs at the end. The Catskills have apparently changed since Arthur Kober worked them over in Wish You Were Here. The observation of Jewish resort life is acute, and the book reads easily, but the story is presented in so relentlessly objective a style that some may find it difficult to become involved with the characters and others may find them downright repulsive.