Gas Bomb

THE STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER--Elliot Paul--Random House ($2.50).

The literary career of heavy-jowled, bearded, 48-year-old Elliot Paul might be pointed as moral for expatriates. Living in Europe most of the time since 1925, he has published eight books; all except one dealt with Americans. But the only success among them was the one with foreign characters: The Life and Death of a Spanish Town, which told the tragic story of Santa Eulalia, where Elliot Paul lived from 1931 until his last-minute departure aboard a German cruiser in 1936.

During his "exile" in the U. S. (he returned to Paris two months ago), Elliot Paul wrote a novel, Concert Pitch, and spent much time studying U. S. labor. The result is The Stars and Stripes Forever. A strike novel laid in a one-man manufacturing town in Connecticut, it contains no Communist character, goes light on leftist propaganda. Conceit rather than the C.I.O. accounts for the fact that the villain, Tycoon Loring, finally gets the whole town down on him, including the high school football team. With its neat plot and smooth dialogue, The Stars and Stripes Forever is a sort of left wing Satevepost story--an attempt to adapt to left wing fiction the technique of catching gas bombs and tossing them back before they explode.

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