Sugar and Spice and All That Is Vice: That's What Robbins Heroes Are Made Of the Ringside

Pete Hamill claims to have once been told how to use words. In the introduction to a 1971 publication of his collected writings, Hamill quotes his mentor Tom McMahon on the subject. "Words are not meant to be slapped on the page with careless abandon," McMahon says. "Words are to be used with care, even love." This is precisely the kind of advice that columnists like Hamill apparently find the hardest to follow.

The column which Hamill bangs out for the New York Daily News three times a week more often than not shows the limits of fast writing. He usually enters the 42nd Street newsroom around noon, fatigued after several hours spent on street corners interviewing people and pressured by the four p.m. deadline. His writing is a kind of hit or miss occupation. He doesn't have the time to make each word mean something. Regardless of the complex emotional feelings he has towards his subject for the day, the copy often rolls off the presses sounding trite and over-simplified.

The Daily News is a best-seller newspaper, and its writers, it seems, may be forced by time and iron gloves to revert to cheap tactics to maintain the largest circulation in the country. But when Hamill sits down to write a novel, we might hope that he could revise his relationship with the typewriter. Flesh and Blood, Hamill's latest novel, however, exposes Hamill either in a spell of extreme laziness or an inability, after so many years of banging out copy under deadline, to write thoughtful prose.

Flesh and Blood begins like another version of Rocky. The tale of his protagonist, Bobby Fallon, does not blossom into a sweet romance with a girl who becomes very beautiful when she takes off those big glasses of hers. Rather, Fallon falls in love with his mother to set the stage for an incestuous relationship that reveals nothing but perversity, lacking in any sort of meaning, and leaving the book without much purpose or plot.

Apparently, Hamill started out to write a novel about a boxer, realizing after 60 pages that "what it all was really about was incest." A few profanities and he was right in the middle of the Oedipal ring. So he took the story to its logical end, sort of.

Whatever Hamill is trying to say about incest falls short of being at all comprehensive. He should have stuck with the fairly insightful thoughts on why Fallon likes to box, that he began with: The story revolves around an Irish kid from Brooklyn, who gets himself involved in a barroom brawl and winds up in jail. Jail turns out to do him a lot of good, because it is there that trainers discover Bobby's boxing talent (he isn't a good fighter yet, but he's got the instinck...), and launch him into training for the all-impressive boxing career which follows.

Hamill's news column is inconsistent in quality. When a writer shows his talents on only a few occasions, connected by periods of turning out nothing but trash, he should think about cutting back output, or staying away from meaty issues. Hamill must have written Flesh and Blood to be devoured and easily digested. His die-hard New York fans will no doubt eat up the sex and violence, in spite of the nutritional void