Alvah Bessie, whose Hollywood career was brutally truncated as a result of the studio blacklist, has, in [One for My Baby], created a cast of fascinating, complex and troubled people struggling with themselves and each other in a San Francisco nightclub during the 1950s. (p. 319)

Banished from his chosen occupation in 1947, he has held various nonprofessional jobs. His finest novel to date, One for My Baby, builds on one of those jobs: his stint at the "hungry i" nightclub in San Francisco. The torn and troubled decades of the 1930s and 1940s left many people physically, mentally and spiritually maimed. Bessie has selected about a dozen of these "cripples," placed them in The Night Box, a cabaret headlining folk groups and stand-up comics, and set them struggling to compensate for their missing limbs, egos, careers, or humane qualities.

It is a naturalistic novel, with no particular moral or...