Word Desert

By Martha Duffy

THE ADVERTISING MAN

by JACK DILLON

316 pages. Harper's Magazine Press.

$6.95.

If this were a polished writing job, it would be one more of those slick commercial novels about an ad agency. Instead, it is clumsy, serious and painstaking, and perhaps as a consequence, considerably more enlightening. The agency involved is called Gibbs & Wilson, and at G. & W. creativity is king, writers venerated, research unheard of. The hero is Copy Chief Jim Bower, a dour, taciturn fellow known throughout the trade for lines like (to sell a brand of vodka): "Tell your mother-in-law it's potato soup--she'll love it." When Jim sits down to do an ad, he has nothing in front of him but a piece of paper; if he feels inspired to write a commercial about stewardesses for an airline, what is it to him if stewardesses happen to rank last in the latest surveys of what customers care about in an airline?

Then Bower's indulgent boss is killed in a cab accident. His replacement as agency head is George Brice, who looks like a druggist and talks fluent corporatese. Brice's reputation is based on the Relief headache-remedy ad, showing a diagram of a headache inside a head being attacked by little cowboys on horses. The cowboys are Relief's ingredient Sooth-X, and they got into the ad by decisively defeating little airplanes, tigers, rocket ships and genies in consumer testing reports. Brice's goal is to replace Gibbs & Wilson's list of luxury clients with packaged-goods industry giants. "Why, a friend of mine at Procter & Gamble told me I was taking over a zoo," he complains, shortly thereafter locking recalcitrant animals like Jim Bower out of their comfortable cages.

Neither Brice nor Bower is a very original character. The kind of crisis described here, in which power switched from creative personnel to research-oriented account executives, was a familiar story along Madison Avenue during the recession two years ago. What the author, who is a vice president of Doyle Dane Bernbach, does very convincingly is to convey what life in a big-time agency must be like: the daily routine, the steps up, sideways and down, the monotonous tides of taste and style, the Byzantine rules of client diplomacy. Though the comparison may seem incongruous, Dillon's approach to his professional world resembles Mystery Writer Dick Francis' to the ambience of horse racing (TIME, May 22). Both authors fairly radiate authenticity born of total immersion in the subject, a mania for getting detail right, and a sympathetic ear for the nuances and cliches of shoptalk.

Such sympathy is in constant jeopardy here because of the characters' grisly speech habits. The book is full of basically decent men who seem obliged to come across as loudmouthed smart alecks. "Jim, old buddy, how's your sex life?" is a Westport way of saying hello. "What are you running here, a desert?" is a necessary preamble to ordering drinks. Even the boozehound on doubles has a wretched little snapper handy: "Two Scotch on the rocks, put them in the same glass, will you?" The irony is that Dillon is painting a verbal desert inhabited by people who live off words. His achievement, modest but real, is that he manages to populate the place with recognizable, sympathetic forms of life.

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