The author quite faithfully describes this escalator world unresigned to its commercialism and unsure of its moral or intellectual status, with its loose, self-protecting, sporty jargon-“here’s the pitch,” “going to kick the speech around,” “plans spelled out a little more.” There are some candid shots of Rockefeller Plaza types: the bland personnel man who suddenly slides his chair into a reclining position in the middle of an interview the president who is cheerful, simple, and spontaneous as long as he has another business appointment to look forward to, but gets edgy on his living room sofa. Hemmed in by his $7,000 a year, Tom leaves his job with a small philanthropic foundation for a higher-salaried, higher-pressured publicity job at the United Broadcasting Company. It takes a certain kind of courage on the part of a novelist (or perhaps simply an instinct about his reading audience) to create a hero with so little drive or distinction.
He thus takes his stand on the dominant white-collar ideal of a nine-to-five job, with evenings and weekends reserved for the family. For them Tom’s most applaud-able gesture is his insistence, at the risk of losing his job, that he cannot give all his time and energy to his work. Wilson’s readers would like to shed the tenors of the last war and the grievances of the depression years, and give themselves over to domestic pleasures and responsibilities. Tom seems to be a suitable hero for a society of vanishing extremes where minimal comforts are fairly secure and maximal ambitions extend to the next step ahead. This may help explain why The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit has sped its way up the best-seller list. Tom Rath’s small suburban Connecticut house, his weedy garden, his money problems, and his wife Betsy’s belated chicken pox must hit the middle-class reader with a shock of recognition. If both novelists harp on the tension and insecurity of the modern temper, they are opposite as mercury and glue otherwise. Wilson’s language is understated, sporting, fighting to maintain a kind of surface integrity Halevy’s is like the buzz in a college corridor: corny, articulate, palpitating, and heated. The Young Lovers is about a more unruly, naive, and erratic America that pitches its hopes and disappointments high, lives on nerve, jokes, and coicidence, and squeezes the most out of each situation. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is about the America of real estate ads and New Yorker stories, whose good-looking, poised, casual heroes get along with their bosses and neighbors, but are victims of creeping gripes and numbness at home.
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