WHEN A FRIEND told me about On High Steel last week he said it was a book about iron-workers and that it was good. I asked him what it was. He asked me what I meant. I said, come on--is it a novel, or non-fiction, or what? No, he said, waving an arm impatiently--it's just a book, you know, a book.

I guess that's true. The Coop had it in the Architecture section, but maybe it should have been in a "book" section somewhere, a section founded on the assumption that everybody has a story to tell or a home to tell about. Mike Cherry's home is among the ironworkers, and his story is of his trade--ironworking. He says he wants to make it come alive by putting it all in a book. Putting it in a book, though, is why he fails--which I think he knows by the end. Whether he knows it or not, he winds up telling us that so-called "working-class literature" in this society may be a contradiction in terms.

But first, like Mike Cherry did first, I should say quickly who the ironworkers are: Ironworkers are the men who ride the tops of tall buildings as the buildings go up, fitting together beams and columns (the "iron," which is really steel) and climbing higher as they build to build more. They wear yellow hardhats, drink too much, and have a strong sense of their elite status in construction work. There are 175,000 of them and they belong to a union called The International Brotherhood of Bridge, Structural, and Ornamental Ironworkers. The most prestigious among them are the "connectors," who actually lay the iron. They get paid the most, and they take the most risks. One out of every fifteen ironworkers is killed during his first ten years on the job. Their life insurance premiums are as high as the skyscrapers they clamber across. Things like tools drop from the heights, too--Mike Cherry's children are taught never to walk on the same side of the street as a construction site.

The ironworkers make a very tight subculture. They stay among their own kind, do bars and movies and sports, and they don't write books. Obviously not many walk around with Ph.D.'s, but Mike Cherry says there are other reasons:

Most of us scarcely use words at all, tending to make our needs known to each other through inflection, gesture, and yelling. At work we signal each other with arm and hand motions, with bells, and by banging on the iron with wrenches, because the noisiness of a construction site precludes ordinary speech, and most of us, after spending a few years alongside air compressors, jack hammers, unmuffled donkey engines, and welding machines, are deaf anyway.

Language, he says, is not "Language as Word:"

Most of us simply don't know a lot of words. It doesn't really matter: I have a Newfie friend (from Newfoundland) who can say "Laird sufferin' Jesus" in so many ways that it provides specific judgment on everything from a collapsing derrick to a pretty girl at lunchtime. And I stayed on top of the Knights of Columbus building one afternoon after the work day was over, watching the tankers on New Haven Harbor turn slowly into black bugs as the sun went down behind Fisher's Island, while the man beside me, previously known to me only as a loquacious idiot, stood for half an hour stock-still with his mouth shut.

SO IRONWORKERS don't write books. Everyone is very eager for workers to do so, of course. Upper-middle-class writers take "sabbaticals" to soil their hands and find out what it's really like; reporters loiter nervously in bars in Queens waiting for something to be said so they can sneak outside and put it in their notebooks; sociologists write about it from the outside. But except for verbal records like those collected by Studs Terkel, or stuff like Nate Shaw's All God's Dangers, you just can't get no genuine working-class lit in the U.S.A.

Through a freakish set of circumstances, though, Mike Cherry found himself in a position to try. He began in the middle class, and wound up an ironworker for seven years, going through the ranks and becoming a part of the trade, devoted to it, so that he's still ironworking and will apparently never quit. He became an ironworker, but even that worked against the book in the end. Anyway, he started as a schoolteacher, for nine years. Then something happened:

When my wife divorced me I went up to Elmira, because I didn't know anyone there, and rented a room. July and half of August passed without my noticing them. I took out a library card, using it a couple of times a week to check out great heaps of garbage: science fiction, mysteries, fantasy. There was a pizza shop two blocks from my room, and I stopped there periodically, buying three or four whole pies at once. They were stacked in my room and eaten over several days, washed down with warm quarts of beer. I had no refrigerator, nor cared whether the beer was warm or the pizza cold.

It's a person taking himself completely apart, cutting himself off from the conditions that bred him. He runs out of money, and is forced to go out on the street. He takes a factory job in Elmira, and becomes a regular at a bar, still in limbo. At the pool table he gets to know one of the fellows who struts in every day with a group of loud and dirt-streaked worked wearing hardhats and carrying toolbelts. They are ironworkers. After some time they take him to see "Jack."

"Are you a drunk?" he asked.

"No."

"Show up regular?"

"You know anything about the work?"