Hardly Hopkins

BEFORE You Go (437 pp.)--Jerome Weidman--Random House ($4.95).

Many readers still remember the alcoholic hero of The Lost Weekend desperately trying to hock his typewriter to buy booze and finding the New York pawnshops closed; the shops are owned by Jews, and they are closed because it is Yom Kippur, the most important of Jewish holidays. This novel presents a similar but even more poignant dilemma. The heroine's older sister has got herself pregnant by her boss, a married man; she tries desperately to cash a check for an abortion, but finds she cannot because Franklin Delano Roosevelt has just closed the banks.

For some reason, the only way out of this dilemma seems to be suicide, but before the girl jumps out of a window, she manages to spread the impression that the villain was not her boss, but a footloose social worker named Benjamin Franklin Ivey. The preposterous melodrama that hinges on this case of mistaken paternity is remotely interesting only because perennially bestselling Author Weidman (I Can Get It for You Wholesale, The Enemy Camp) has fashioned Ben Ivey in the unmistakable outer image of Harry Hopkins, that famed, dark-grey eminence of the New Deal.

A fictional conjecture about What Made Harry Run, against the background of New Deal politics, could have been a highly interesting book, but Author Weidman does not even try to write it. Freely and rather irresponsibly, he tacks together the familiar Hopkins characteristics--his social work beginnings, his poor health and cadaverous looks, his rise to Olympus as Roosevelt's closest adviser. But these traits clothe a synthetic creature wholly unlike Hopkins in his private involvements and far duller than Harry in his political intrigues. Much, of the book is taken up with Ivey's having a mysterious fit in wartime London (he has them all the time). The Old Country peasant remedy that can save him is known only to the book's heroine, Julie, the suicide's younger sister, a girl of indomitable goodness of heart and boundless puerility. Ben, of course, is on a presidential mission of civilization-shattering importance, but Julie still thinks he is the cad who drove her sister to doom, so she will not help. Or will she? The reader can only wish that F.D.R.

had never closed those banks.

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