Up from the Slag

PETER DOMANIG IN AMERICA: STEEL (476 pp)--Victor White-- Bobbs-Merrill ($3.95).

Some of the most exciting novels about American industry have been written by those who liked it least. In the pages of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser or Upton Sinclair, industry is a jungle inferno of grab and stab. But behind the social bias is the magnetic pull of wheat, or rail roads, or oil, and what it means to work with and around the sources of American industrial power. Author Victor White has put some of this magnetism without the bias into Peter Domanig in America. Where he falls short of the earlier models is in making his hero too goody-goody to be true.

Peter Domanig is an Austrian immigrant lad who comes to the U.S. at 17, just after World War I. (Author White has already covered his boyhood in a 1944 novel, Morning in Vienna.) Peter bypasses the glitter of New York in the '20s and an easy suburban life with an American foster father, and heads for smoky, industrial Pittsburgh to make his own way. From there on, his progress reads like a guided tour of the steel industry from the slag up. conducted by a man who knows his subject and loves to talk shop.

Less mindful that he is writing about the making of an American than about the making of steel. Author White sometimes puts his hero through private experiences at a whirling pace. Within a ten-page stretch. Peter meets and rebuffs his first American prostitute, goes inside his first American church (a Roman Catholic cathedral), sees his first prizefight and enters his first speakeasy. Seething with ambition, he decides that love is off-limits and only strays once, into a brief affair with his plump landlady.

Night courses at Carnegie Tech bring out an inventive flair in Peter and take him away from open hearths and Bessemer converters into the research laboratory. At novel's end, Peter leaves the steel industry, prematurely invents an automatic record-changer and is about to take a flyer in the manufacturing end of the newly born radio industry. Peter Domanig promises to be a Lanny Budd-of-all-trades, and Author White certainly does not intend to cramp his style. He has already announced two forthcoming sequels, Brass and Gold.

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