Fuchs does not offer solutions to … social problems. There are none. This is not to say that Fuchs did not criticize the system. There is in his writing an implied criticism of capitalism…. Fuchs's world is full of corruption and violence, and he demonstrates repeatedly that one must be dishonest and corrupt to succeed. (pp. 22-3)

What strikes one first of all about Daniel Fuchs's novels and stories, especially if they're compared to the work of other "Jewish American" writers, is that Fuchs has no designs on his readers. No large thoughts, no postcards to deaf intellectuals, no theories about the future of the novel, not even grudges against relatives. Fuchs is a pure novelist…. The traditional act of imitation, putting down a picture-in-language of how people live at a certain time, a certain plac...

[With] The Apathetic Bookie Joint Daniel Fuchs has at last made a comeback. It is a most welcome event. For with this collection of his short fiction a prodigal returns. His youthful ambition had been to record the trapped and alienated lives of his native Brooklyn…. A peculiar blend of irony with good humour gave his writing a flavour all its own. The move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1937, it now turns out, did nothing to queer the tone. If anything, it was enriched.

The early stories [appearing in The Apathetic Bookie Joint] though colorful …, seem to me to have been done largely as hack work for hack magazines; and they, too, bear the deformations of their martyrdoms: a pandering to types, a tic of colloquial language asserting itself rather too heavily, at times, like paprika in a cream sauce, and far too many colorful characters with odd streetwise things to say. But this is not the case with some of Fuchs's later, more thoughtful accounts of Hollywood...

In the writing of fiction, talent came almost as easily to Daniel Fuchs as to Willie Mays in the hitting of baseballs. There is a kind of performer whom we call "a natural," so completely do his gifts appear to be spontaneous and inborn; and Daniel Fuchs was precisely that, the natural as writer. In the mid-Thirties … he published three novels in quick succession—Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, and Low Company…. Fuchs drew upon his own experience as a boy growi...

["The Apathetic Bookie Joint" is] a collection of those stories the author wishes most to preserve, and a hitherto-unpublished Hollywood novella, "Triplicate." The first of these stories appeared in The New Yorker in 1938, and the last in Commentary in 1975. They begin, as did Mr. Fuchs himself, in Williamsburg. Brooklyn…. And they culminate in affluent Beverly Hills…. (p. 9) Mr. Fuchs seems to appear as himself, or an only thinly disguised character, in all these s...

[How] strangely the words and the phrases [of West of the Rockies] seem to lie on the page—to me a puzzle more perplexing than Burgess's wild language. I suppose I just haven't the key to it. I lack the responses that would lift the words into life. I can try to explain it this way. The story is about a time in the late 50's, before Hollywood's decline: a screen star, someone of the stature of Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, is on the run to Palm Springs with a small-time ag...