Fast Typing

THE BALANCE WHEEL (496 pp.)--Taylor Caldwell--Scribner ($3.50).

Taylor Caldwell once explained how she writes her bestselling novels: "I type very quickly. Also, I never rewrite. I don't even read over what I have written. I just send it off in installments to [the publisher]." Her most "lyrical prose" results, she says, "from the anticipation of big checks from my publishers and the book clubs. My best writing has been done . . . when I had a new car, a new home, a trip, or a mink coat in mind."

Typewriter in hand and mink coat clearly in mind, Novelist Caldwell has batted out twelve bestsellers (3,215,300 copies) in the last twelve years. With her 13th novel, busy ex-Court Reporter Caldwell proves once again that she still types very quickly.

The Balance Wheel refers to a heavy-witted Pennsylvania Dutchman who is no more the hero of a novel than the dumpling in a dish of Sauerbraten. He just happens to sit in the middle of the concoction. His three brothers--a steel-fisted money-grabber, a radical of the Debs persuasion, a soft-fingered esthete--are all pulling in different directions, threatening to tear the family business apart. Loyal Charles, the balance wheel, tries to keep them all geared together, and the concern, a tool company, going straight down the middle of the road.

The Balance Wheel was plainly intended to be read as a political-economic allegory. Veteran Caldwell fans may ignore such implications, and read the book for the same reason they listen to soap opera: to get the dirt, dished by an expert, on a dozen or more private lives.

There is no question that Novelist Caldwell knows how to serve up her gossip with relish. And in the process, she occasionally produces the same kind of little home truths that a good soap-opera scripter turns out. Readers who find it worthwhile to wade through 496 pages of Novelist Caldwell's fast typing in search of such finds will undoubtedly set sales of The Balance Wheel to rising as merrily as those of its twelve predecessors.

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