Gaps in the Gait : WINTER IN FLORIDA<i> by Edward Falco (Soho Press: $18.95; 300 pp.) </i>

Edmund Wilson was the first important American critic to note, in a 1941 essay called “The Boys in the Back Room,” that it would be almost impossible to overrate the influence of movies on the modern novel. He pointed out that Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” could be transferred to the screen as easily as if it had been written for that medium, and the same was true of most of the popular novels then being churned out like sweet butter by writers aiming for a quick movie sale.

Since then, with the advent of the TV miniseries, the technique has become epidemic and now applies not only to popular fiction but to supposedly serious works of art as well. Many writers hardly bother these days to tell us what their characters look like, what they’re wearing, how they move, what they see, to say nothing of their backgrounds, their social circumstances and the landscape around them. These are details that the camera can illuminate in a single frame, so why waste words? Let the characters speak and do things to each other--action!--and the more violent the better.

A good case in point is Edward Falco’s “Winter in Florida,” a very tough, very violent first novel by a writer of considerable ability. His short stories, essays and poems have appeared in a number of scholarly periodicals; he has won awards for his short fiction, and he teaches writing at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Before that, he worked for eight years as a manual laborer, as well as a stable hand at various race tracks.

It is this latter activity that he mines for his novel. His protagonist, Jesse Skyne, is a nice middle-class boy who runs away from his white-collar pursuits to become a groom for a private racing stable at a harness track in Florida. His ambition is to become “a trainer-driver. Race in the big races. The Hambletonian.” He’s very green and he knows it, but reasons that he’ll succeed because he’s prepared to work hard and is smarter than most of the people “born around horses.”

Unfortunately, he falls in with a beautiful waif, appropriately nicknamed Easy, and a group of backstretch bravos who seem to spend more time sniffing coke, popping pills, partying, fornicating and brawling in bars than they do taking care of the expensive animals entrusted to their care. Eventually, their activities lead to mayhem and murder, so that by the end of this cautionary tale our hero, physically battered and his ambitions in ruins, is forced to retreat back into his duller but much safer world.

There’s not the least question here that Falco knows what he’s writing about. He has a fine ear for dialogue and his people sound like race-trackers, most of whom are uneducated, insular, cynical, foulmouthed and locked into behavioral codes not unlike those of the Old West. What ultimately unites them and keeps them going is the hope of latching on to the “big horse,” the animal who will win an important race for them and put money in their pockets. They have no other talents to fall back on and so no other dreams to pursue. Instant gratification, whether it be a winning parimutuel ticket, a quick lay or the best high, is the foundation of their lives, which have been conditioned by childhoods of poverty and the sorts of violence that they themselves practice.

What is missing from this novel, however, is the craftsmanship and care for detail that a first-rate writer should bring to his view of whatever world he chooses to explore. It doesn’t take an excess of words to illuminate a scene, merely a few well-chosen ones. Bad writers overwrite; lazy ones and those with their eyes on Hollywood leave too much out.

Here we have to imagine everything from what Falco’s people say and do rather than from anything the author himself wishes to convey. We learn very little, for instance, and that only obliquely, about any of the characters’ backgrounds and motivations--not even about Jesse’s own ambitions until late in the book.

The biggest omission of all is the daily life of the track itself. Falco knows very well that the hours around the barns are long and grueling, lasting from pre-dawn until twilight, seven days a week, but that reality hardly figures at all in his story. Furthermore, no horse owner or trainer I know would tolerate for even a day the sort of behavior these people indulge in, mainly because no professional operation could survive a week with such employees.

Thanks to the screen, Mies van der Rohe’s famous aphorism, “Less is more,” seems to have become the rule in writing. Often, however, less isn’t enough.