Madison Avenue Macbeth

THE PRICE IS RIGHT (316 pp.)--Jerome Weidman--Harcourf, Brace ($3).

Nobody can roast tiger (two-legged, money-hungry variety) with the searing yellow flame that Jerome Weidman uses. In his first novel, I Can Get It For You Wholesale, and a sequel, Weidman barbecued some of the pin-striped denizens of Manhattan's garment district. In his latest (and sixth) novel, the tiger wears tweeds and its hunting grounds are the knotty-pine fastnesses of a Madison Avenue newspaper syndicate; but when the price is right, the beast still shows its breed.

Henry Cade was pushing 30, apparently only mildly restless in his second-drawer job at Vinnaver & Jaxon. Then he got his break: the syndicate rights to a rising young columnist named Wally Pohl. In return for the rights to "Pohl's Apart," V. & J. made Henry a full partner. Then Henry realized that "you could no more want a little success than you could want a little love ... To want less than everything was to get nothing."

The story of how Henry went after everything and got nothing wears such a high polish that readers may scarcely realize it is essentially an old shoe: the same kind of satiric article Frederic Wakeman tried to fit on the advertising business in The Hucksters. Weidman's is the better fit. His boardroom oratory and office memoranda strike the ear with just the right sound of bursting fruit, and he can nail his types with the deftness of a bartender spearing a cherry with a toothpick. Says one of his newspaper executives, nodding toward his wife and suggesting another round of drinks: "I have an old beat-up legman here, or legwoman, rather, who helps me with odds and ends around the house, such as bearing children, finding collar buttons, and making drinks for guests. How about it?"

Parallel with the satire in The Price Is Right, Weidman tries something bigger; he appears to offer Henry Cade as a sort of modern Macbeth, a surrogate for all men gnawed by too much ambition. But Weidman's Macbeth remains strictly from Madison Avenue, and one side of the street at that.

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