The '30s Revisited

WE FISHED ALL NIGHT (560 pp.)--Willard Motley -- Appleton-Cenfury-Crofts ($3.75).

An angry young Chicago Negro named Willard Motley made a hit, four years ago, with his first novel, Knock on Any Door. It was the story of a murdering hoodlum, written in hoarse tones of social complaint, clearly implying that the whole mess was really society's fault, not the killer's. Many critics liked it, and later it was made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart.

Motley still sounds angry, and his new novel, We Fished All Night, is written in the same hoarse voice. It begins with a strike at a big Chicago mail-order house, and ends ten years later with another strike at the same place. Between these two points, Author Motley has strung three plots. Jim Norris rises to the leader ship of the local union, almost cracks up psychologically (he has an urge to molest children), but pulls himself together in time to lead the second strike. Don Lockwood, a handsome Polish boy (born Kosinski), is torn between labor politics and the Chicago smart set; he gets to be a Democratic Party boss, but lets the workers down in the second strike. Aaron Levin, a sensitive young Jewish intellectual, wanders through the Catholic Church, the Communist Party and the local synagogue in search of a sustaining faith.

These characters take a long time getting to predictable ends. Labor Leader Norris finds peace of a sort on the picket line, Political Boss Lockwood marries a rich girl who gives him a rough time, and Intellectual Levin wallows through one of the longest nervous breakdowns in literary history.

If sincerity were enough to make a good novel, We Fished All Night might be a minor masterpiece. It has a few vivid mo ments: a comic meeting of ward heelers, a warm glimpse of a Polish family. But for the most part its political sermonizing stirs unhappy memories of the "proletarian fiction" of the 19305. In 560 closely printed pages, that is too much of a bad thing.

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