Different Pajama Game

SAY, DARLING (308 pp.)--Richard BisselI--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.95).

How 'ya gonna keep 'em out in Dubuque, after they've seen Broadway? In the case of Dick Bissell, the answer is not easy. When his funny little 1953 novel, 7 1/2 Cents, was turned by Director George Abbott & Co. into a hit musical. The Pajama Game, the big money and the taste of Broadway may have weakened Author Bissell's resistance to the charms of the old ladies from Dubuque. He now lives just up the road a piece from Times Square in Exurbia, Connecticut, with his wife and four children, gets along with two station wagons and an old taxi he picked up in London, and resolutely rights off the old nostalgia for his two Mississippi River houseboats. No matter how many agents get pieces of Dick Bissell, there will probably always be one piece of him that is pure Midwest.

Proof is spread all over the pages of his new novel, the consistently funny story of the heartland rube who went to New York dressed in an inferiority complex and won through to the jackpot. Midwesterner Jack Jordan has written a book-club selection in his spare time while working at the old family foundry (Bissell himself had worked at the old family pajama factory). When a couple of brash young producers summon him to New York and ask him to turn the book into a play, he feels like an impostor. But with the help of a shrewd director who strongly resembles George Abbott. Jack Jordan attains the rube's satisfaction of seeing the city slickers lined up all around the block trying to get ducats for his play. Show biz is about as comprehensible to him as a Variety headline, and creates a surrealist zone in which Jack can never find his way, especially after the daily ration of martinis. To make matters worse, his wife and four children bulk awfully large just about the time Jack has begun trailing after lovely Star Irene Lovelle like a morose coon hound.

Author Bissell has a field day with the phony chatter of theater people and New York conversation generally. And coming from where the girls eat better. he cannot entirely appreciate the Manhattan dames who "have eleven-inch waists, barndoor mouths, and stand around on the sidewalks with their feet at right angles to one another." But he can also be pretty biting about life back home and "the plumbing, dry-battery, wallboard. disk-harrow and axle-grease aristocracy." There speaks a man--Dick Bissell as much as Jack Jordan--caught in the middle between houseboats and station wagons, between the home that made him and a home he hasn't yet made.

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