Without trying to be sociological or symbolical, Mr. Wilson has got more of the late 'forties and early 'fifties into ["The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit"] than any other writer I know of; he has captured something of the unease of the time, its neurotic worry and speed and pressure. Yet Mr. Wilson is never portentous nor grimly profound; he writes fiction, not a Ph.D. thesis, and he has wit…. The story concerns a not so very young couple and in particular the husband's attempt to keep alive his marriage, his own self, and his roots in the past. Mr. Lionel Trilling has somewhere said something to the effect that the novel is—must be—about money. Mr. Wilson's novel is about money; it is also about one of the important phenomena of our day, the dropping down in the social and economic scale of many...