New York City's Borough of Brooklyn has been for so long a subject of literary and vaudeville humor that it is pleasant to find Irwin Shaw defending it in several of the twenty stories which make up "Sailor off the Bremen." Unlike most native Brooklynites, who are nearly always ashamed to admit that they hail from the City of Churches, he is forthright in declaring his affection for his home town and the three million who live in it.
Though the title story, a vigorous melodrama, is the outstanding item in the collection, the ones set in Brooklyn come off to better advantage than those which find Mr. Shaw wandering in distant parts. "The Boss," "The Monument," "Second Mortgage," and "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" enlist our sympathies with greater shrewdness than such stories as "The Deputy Sheriff" (New Mexico) or "Walk along the Charles River" (Middle West). All of them, like his charming play of last season, "The Gentle People," combine understated sentiment and a wry, sympathetic humor; and all of them have an immensely graphic quality. His taxi drivers, pugilists, little business men, and their domineering wives are commonplace people who are never puffed up beyond human recognition. Those who have compared Shaw to Clifford Odets in the theater will find in his first book none of that oblique lyricism and Chekovian intellectualism so peculiar to Odets's characters.
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