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Mr Brian Glanvile’s first collection of short stories has been deservedly praised. It is not, at certain moments, free of the faults that have hitherto slightly disfigured all of his books — a lack of austerity in the writing, which can slacken off for whole pages at a time into something not far removed from a comfortable woman’s magazine journalese, an occasional glibness of reaction that comes from too ready-made a view of human categories, and a related facility that suggests, if not exactly knowingness, at least a feeling that the author is never at a loss, either as the narrator or in character. The result of these defects is that some of the stories seem contrived, and all but the best of them lack density and tension. In a sense, this is perhaps no more than saying that Mr Glanville writes too easily and a shade carelessly; and that, rather than trust his stories to develop organically, he uses rather old-hat Maugham-ish devices to shape them.
 
     None of this interferes with the real interest of Mr Glanville’s book, which is quite exceptional, both in its subject matter and its treatment. He deals on the whole with three main subjects: the experience of being Jewish in a prosperous Jewish middle-class society, urban existence in Italy, and the world of the professional footballer. The Jewish stories, on the bitter rather than the sweet side, make their points with a slightly over-emphatic distaste. One can recognize their quality without being able to vouch for their accuracy. Indeed it seems impossible for a Jewish writer to create any picture of Jewish society anywhere that other Jewish writers will admit as being just or authentic. (Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, which won the Aga Khan Fiction Prize and the National Book Award in America, and was praised by three Jewish writers, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, for the fidelity of its portrait of the Jewish upper middle-class, has been roundly denounced in the Winter issue of Partisan Review, as being inaccurate and distorting, and the distinguished Jewish supporters of the novel described as old-fashioned non-bourgeois intellectuals who have made their careers in academic or literary circles. What, indeed, can they know of Jewish materialism?)

     The Italian stories are generally free of ex-patriate sentimentality or exoticism, and it is one of Mr Glanville’s charms that he writes about Italy very much as contemporary Italians do, with a regard for their susceptibilities, vanities and necessary fantasies that remains tender while being essentially ironic. His Italian towns are places where Italians live and work, dreaming about clothes, girls and football, not just tourist-spots turned into Guggenheim-Fulbright colonies. His instinctive absorption of the character of various northern Italian cities, his obvious rapport with Italians of his own generation, is almost unique in an English writer. You could make the switch from a season of Antonioni films to one of Glanville’s stories, without any feeling that you were suddenly looking through a foreigner’s eyes. Perhaps the fact that Glanvile is still under thirty has most to do with it. At the same time, he has lived and worked in Italy, not merely made visits to it.

     In the last resort, however, it is the football stories (several of which are set in Italy, where Mr Glanville worked on the Corriere dello Sport) that show best this writer’s real originality and his exciting extension of the usual territories of English fiction. His publishers assert that ‘if he chose he could become the English Ring Lardner’. Though this analogy will do as a loose generalization, its implications are unhealthy and I hope very much that Mr Glanville will not so choose. Lardner did all kinds of interesting things, from ‘refashioning the American language’ (Geismar) to opening up all sorts of new experiences for American intellectuals, such as golf, billiards, boxing and baseball. He was admired equally by Edmund Wilson, Virginia Woolf, Scott Fitzgerald and literally hundreds of thousands of ordinary sports readers. He was a masterly mimic, a brilliant tape-recorder of pointless and moronic dialogue. His dramatic sketches make N. F. Simpson and Harold Pinter appear to be clinging to his coat-tails and the present theatrical avant-garde seem curiously rearguard. But, as Fitzgerald pointed out, he grew cynical towards his own material, which he quickly outgrew and caricatured. He settled for being a comic writer, a parodist, with no evident concern for the human beings, with human aspirations as well as romantic and sexual hankerings, that existed inside their sports clothes.

     Mr Glanville is, on the surface, an altogether more conventional writer, but he has something of Lardner’s wonderful ear for dialogue, his mimicry never gets out of hand, and, most important of all, he is aware, as Lardner never was, of the different levels at which human beings can communicate. That is to say, in such stories as ‘The Footballers’, ‘Hanger-On’, ‘Domani’, and ‘Everything Laid On’, football becomes merely an extension of life, the normal ambiguities do not suddenly cease to operate. Glanville is able, in these stories, to expore and explain an unfamiliar close-knit society, and he succeeds in giving depth and variety to it without either satirizing or cheapening it. Their opening paragraphs give an indication of his immediacy and skill in characterization:

‘Hallo-my-dear !’ Franco never spoke on the telephone, he bellowed; a great lion’s roar suggesting his scepticism that the instrument really transcended distance.

‘Listen! This morning you come down with me to Rifredi: I make you see what I am doing! Lovely boys ! Beautiful players ! You have no idea! Just like young English players: you will see!’ (‘The Footballers’.)

He was a creature of railway hotels, car parks, dining cars, bleak corridors which led past dressing-rooms. Here, where no one was at home, he too seemed to have his place. (‘Hanger-On’.)

Johnny’s great trouble was that he was small. Or rather, not so much that he was small, but that being small made people think about him as if he was just another small player, if you see what I mean. If he’d had one more stone and another couple of inches, there’s nothing could have stopped him. But on the other hand, you never know: maybe if he’d been bigger he wouldn’t have been the same player. (‘If he’s good enough, he’s big enough’.)

     Mr Glanville writes a grey, classless sort of prose, without attempts at impressiveness or poetry, but it is never less than serviceable. His ear and his eye are so trigger-sharp in their responses, so sensitive to gradations of feeling as they are revealed by inflections and gestures, that he can make clear the truth and genuineness of his backgrounds without real help from a distinctive method. In that sense a style is not what one should demand of him: Lardner wrecked himself through hardening mannerisms and self-parody, and the adaptable chameleon-like qualities of Glanville’s prose should be a safeguard against the same thing happening to him.

     This volume makes plain how much Glanville is a writer to be nurtured. He has range, ideas, fluency, new subjects. His dangers are slickness and the vocational hazards of journalism. However, since he is undoubtedly aware of these, there is every hope that he will avoid them. He has already in The Bankrupts and in the Jewish stories in this book touched areas not often examined in English writing. In Along the Arno and the several stories with Italian settings he takes for granted a sense of belonging that is astonishing in a non-Italian writer. In the football stories he succeeds in getting into fiction a professional activity whose prizes, boredoms, disasters and human tragedies probably come closer to the heart of the ordinary Englishman than any other. It is something no one has ever attempted before, except on pulp magazine level, and Mr Glanville’s achievement is not simply that he exploits this unfamiliar subject, but that in doing so he conveys the excitement, the tension, the romantic glamour, the style after which most human beings hanker as well as the shoddy environments and flawed motives that contribute to the processing of the same dreams.