William Weintraub Why Rock the Boat? (1961)

     William Weintraub Why Rock the Boat? (1961) Harry Barnes, 19, learns the journalism trade at the Witness, a Montreal newspaper that exists to please the advertisers and puff the gentry. He falls for Julia Martin, a female colleague working at another paper, escapes being fired for having written scurrilous practice pieces that feature the tyrannical managing editor of his paper, does a stint as a PR hack, and so on. The city editor, a Milquetoast type whose wife seduced Harry at the yearly journalists’ excursion into ski country, has placed the scurrilous pieces in the paper. And so on. A loosely picaresque novel that never quite comes together, it’s written in a workmanlike style that makes its satirical points with varying subtlety, and occasionally veers off into semi-sentimental suburban yearnings. The characters are rather thin; Barnes is the only one with any depth, and even he’s often too naive to be entirely credible. Or maybe not: the sort of single-minded dorkiness he exhibits in his quest to learn all that there is to learn about newspapering does have the ring of truth.
     Entertaining, and possibly a roman a clef, since Weintraub worked as a reporter in his younger days, and this tale has the whiff of auto-biography about it. According to the cover blurb, the book caused controversy when it was first published, but it seems rather tame now. Canada was still easily shocked in 1961.
     Weintraub loosely adapted his book into a movie in 1974. I saw it many years ago. It has tighter plotting than the book, focussing on Julia’s attempts to form a union (which didn’t figure in the book). See IMDB’s page, and the Canadian Film Encyclopedia here. It was my vague memories of the movie that prompted me to buy this 2nd-hand copy of the book. It's worth than the 25 cents I paid for it.
     Book: ** Movie: **-½