[In "The Troubled Air", his] brisk, journalistic second novel, Irwin Shaw describes the plight of a politically liberal radio director who finds himself embroiled in a purge of Communists and fellow-travelers touched off by a super-patriotic magazine. With impressive circumstantiality he demonstrates what a great many people have been suspecting for some time: that radicalism is no longer fashionable on the air waves and can, as a matter of fact, spin careers downward to economic ruin and suicide. The story has the tantalizing suggestiveness of a roman à clef and in its breathless argumentation can well serve as an index to the political anxieties of our time, but the speechmaking is easy and tedious, after all, and Shaw's rather arbitrary handling of motives makes "The Troubled Air" something less than a literary achievement. (p. 592)

That the political novel is difficult to shape has been the discovery of many writers...