Rice Pudding

IMPERIAL CITY--Elmer Rice--Coward-McCann ($3).

Riled by Broadway's lukewarm-to-cool appreciation of his three last plays (We, the People, Judgment Day, Between Two Worlds), testy, red-headed Elmer Rice (born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein) three years ago made a public face at all dramatic critics and declared he was "disenchanted" with Broadway for good. So far he has kept his word.

Now turned novelist, in Imperial City Elmer Rice has presumably found a satisfying outlet for everything that Broadway did not like. He has also included a lot that it did like. The novel runs to approximately 250,000 words, gives speaking parts to more than 100 characters, covers a range of scenes that would wear the shoes off a dozen reporters. Attempting to do for all New York City what his Street Scene did for one of its blocks, the novel is a sort of tabloid morality play, about on a literary level with Felix Reisenberg's East Side, West Side, leading best-seller of its kind, a number of levels below John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer. Clearly marked for commercial success, this Rice pudding is seasoned with everything that ever came out of Author Rice's cupboard: courtroom atmosphere (On Trial, Counsellor-at-Law), social indignation (We, the People), personal pique (letters to the New York Times), alternately satirical and glamorous treatment of artists, writers and the theatre (The Left Bank), human interest, melodramatic enthusiasm for New York generally. In fact, about the only ingredient the book lacks is good novel-writing.

Most influential characters, though not always the most important, are the members of the powerful banking House of Coleman: flighty, spoiled Dowager Fanny Coleman; her children: square-faced, ruthless Christopher, executive head of the business, who engineers his mother into an asylum; Greg, a notorious playboy; Corinne, sexually inhibited divorcee; Gay, a liberal professor at Columbia University. Considering each of the Colemans as a main stream of his story, Author Rice feeds into them as many tributaries as he can trace down. Thus Christopher's story is fed by his beautiful artists' model, his frigid, hypochondriac wife, his board of directors, particularly by a multimillionaire department-store owner whose business contributes a dozen more stories. The beautiful, shanty Irish gold digger who feeds Greg's story is not so much a tributary as a cloudburst. Corinne's story runs small but fairly clear until it widens muddily when she gets mixed up with a homosexual stage designer. The narrative stream fed by the greatest number of branches, and the only one fit for navigation or swimming, is the one carrying Professor Gay Coleman's story.

Cross-connecting links are provided by a few natural ditches, seepage, floods, more often by artificial ditches of Author Rice's own digging. Thus Christopher's chauffeur is also part owner of a swanky brothel, which gives part-time employment to a Coleman board member's under-financed debutante daughter, who confides casually in Corinne's daughter, who marries Christopher's rising young secretary. In Professor Coleman's case the tributaries and social cross-connections become really complicated. Example: Gay's ex-fiancee becomes the lover of his brother-in-law who, after being ruined by Christopher, is lost on a round-the-world flight with an ugly female novelist, who socks Cinema Idol Perry Kane, who is murdered by Greg when he discovers Kane to be the lover of his gold-digging wife, whom Gay first sees in a sexy performance at a night club where he is slumming with his student sweetheart Judy and his wisecracking friend from Hollywood, whose frustrated sister is a Long Island City slum schoolteacher, her worst pupil being involved in a holdup shooting of the father of Professor Gay's secretary Shirley Livingston (born Lefkowitz), whose family lives with humorous, warm Jewishness on Washington Heights.

In the bay where these streams discharge their mushy load of dead cats, soggy newsprint, an occasional corpse and other social sewage is no place, warns Author Rice, for healthy bathing. But common readers will likely take his melodrama and let his moral go--like street Arabs who will not give up swimming in contaminated waters because thus far they have caught nothing more serious than an occasional case of itch.

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