["What Shall We Wear to This Party?", the] autobiography of the man who wrote "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," seems to promise some unpromising confessions—self-hatred, divorce, alcoholism, middle-aged romantic yearnings, nostalgia about a faded WASP propriety, hapless vanity, Internal Revenue problems, an uneasy Harvard boy now lurking in the body of a grandfather. And, indeed, it delivers this load of splintered kindling. Yet this book, after eight novels, which led ...

The latest 604-page redundancy by [Sloan Wilson, A Sense of Values,] may … serve a purpose: to stimulate total disenchantment with the disenchantment novel…. Nathan Bond, Author Wilson's protagonist, runs true to formula. In most disenchantment novels, the hero is a non-hero who attends an Ivy League college (Nathan goes to Yale), where he is traumatically snubbed because he lacks good looks or money, the two top things, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. Lacking popularity, the non-hero de...

"A Sense of Values" is another handling by Sloan Wilson of the theme of his earlier novel, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." Once again he examines the conflict of ambition with marriage, but this time in a man who has been wildly successful in a corner of the world that Tom Rath in the earlier book partly rejected. Nathan Bond, an artist-poet manqué who finds he has a golden touch as a syndicated cartoonist, is a lot like Rath…. Bond, unlike the temporizing Rath,...