The early stories [appearing in The Apathetic Bookie Joint] though colorful …, seem to me to have been done largely as hack work for hack magazines; and they, too, bear the deformations of their martyrdoms: a pandering to types, a tic of colloquial language asserting itself rather too heavily, at times, like paprika in a cream sauce, and far too many colorful characters with odd streetwise things to say. But this is not the case with some of Fuchs's later, more thoughtful accounts of Hollywood experience through fiction and essay-vignette. Ruminative, observant and gentle, without the caricaturist's meanness, the writer of such stories must have depended on memory to look steadily at people and social situations over time; to dramatize the gestures of social beings in a particularly voluptuous setting and show us as process such life as he had come to know.

In that very long account of...