Word: hailey
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...Moneychangers, Hailey (1 last week...
...ARTHUR HAILEY 472 pages. Doubleday...
...latest novel off the Arthur Hailey assembly line tells the story of the First Mercantile American Bank. It is one of the 20 largest in the country, with its parent-branch office tower gleaming over a composite city in the Midwest. (A dirty river flows past the First Mercantile, and there are plenty of slums.) Following the death of wise and kindly F.M.A. President Ben Rosselli, two vice presidents personifying fiscal vice and fiscal virtue struggle for control...
...bank as a community resource. Vice (who comes equipped with a frigid wife and an effete son) cares only for profit. It is he who pushes a dangerously large loan to a multinational corporation at the expense of municipal bonds and local construction projects. Meanwhile, as background, Hailey provides a bank theft, a counterfeit-credit ring, extramarital affairs, race problems and a Robert Vescoesque corporate swindle...
...encouraged. Fiscal virtue triumphs in the end and has the final words on finance as well. "Banks and the money system," he observes, "are like delicate machinery ... let one component get seriously out of hand because of greed or politics or plain stupidity, and you imperil all the others." Hailey apparently does not feel the same way about fiction. The insider's details that give his novel its texture simply bury its feeble literary qualities...