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 formerly "aristocratic" members of society, the mad struggle to maintain and consolidate one's position in the face not only of terrible economic pressure but in the face, in the teeth, of one's own violent disinclination. All the pathos, absurdity, and humor of the struggle come out clearly in Mr. Wilson's picture of his nice young man on the run. If there is a certain glibness, perhaps, in the conclusion—if Mr. Wilson lets his couple off too easily—I am not sure that this is as grave a fault as may appear…. Much of what Tom Rath, our man in gray flannel, has to cope with is simply Life; we can find it being coped with in the pages of George Eliot or Balzac or Jane Austen in much the same way as here. Mr. Wilson has a grasp of reality, and the novelist's eye and ear.
Louis O. Coxe, in a review of "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," in The Yale Review, Vol. XLV, No. 1, September, 1955, p. 157.
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