High Noon on Wall Street

THE MAN WHO BROKE THINGS (312 pp.)--John Brooks--Harper ($3.95).

In the world of corporate business, the closest thing to a western movie is a proxy fight. The good guys and bad guys unlimber their six-shooters in ads in the newspapers' financial sections. The sheriff (Securities and Exchange Commission) tries to preserve law and order and to protect the widows' and orphans' stock. Each side ropes and brands countless stray cattle (small stockholders) before the big roundup (the proxy count). At "High Noon" (the annual stockholders' meeting) somebody has to bite the dust.

Essentially, this is the story John (A Pride of Lions) Brooks tells in The Man Who Broke Things. His fictional proxy fight leans heavily on recent headline-splashing struggles, notably the Louis Wolfson-Sewell Avery duel for Montgomery Ward. Author Brooks, 37, handles the mechanics of such a contest with authority and relish. He also poses a more serious psychological question: What makes a big company raider tick?

To find the answer, ex-Newspaperman Bob Billings plays the role of public-relations aide and apprentice Faust to a Mephistopheles named Hank Haislip. When Haislip makes a power lunge for

Great Eastern, a merchandising giant, young Billings tags along for the raid even though his father, a banker of ramrod-stiff probity, is a director of the company. Besides, Pressagent Billings is making a raid of his own on Haislip's pretty daughter.

In flashbacks, each man defines the life that helped make him what he is--Billings' background affluent, Eastern, Harvard; Haislip's poor, Midwestern, school of hard knocks. But it is Haislip's mistress who finally tells Billings even more than he wants to know: "You're a saver. Cautious and careful . . . Not Hank. He wants things different. He's a breaker, and you know why? He wants to break things and set them up again so he can be a careful little saver instead of you." Whether the breakers or the savers will carry the day is a suspenseful question Author Brooks does not answer until Great Eastern's final, slam-bang stockholders' meeting.

New Yorker Staffer Brooks writes a clear reportorial style, so coolly equable that at times it scarcely reaches the room temperature needed to sustain living characters. He reserves his warmest affection for the lore of "The Street" itself, from Trinity's spire to the pockmarks preserved in the side of the Morgan bank from the 1920 bombing. The Street may be mildly amused to hear that it is a psychosocial arena of U. v. non-U., and that to the combatants, gaining acceptance is more important than capital gains. As far as Wall Street knows, the real hassle going on is that old-fangled one between the bulls and the bears over money.

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