["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,...

In 1941, before the United States entered the war, the State Department called on the Coast Guard to patrol Greenland's coasts…. Before the war was over, the eight-ship American Greenland Patrol captured one German weather ship and sank another. The Greenland Patrol is the focus of Sloan Wilson's novel, "Ice Brothers."…

The story [of Small Town] is a familiar one and Sloan Wilson … executes it with few surprises. Hewat, who drives a white Lincoln Continental, is the stock local businessman-politician; the Kellys are the stock Irish family down to their very names; the California to which Ben compares Livingston is the stock playground of rich, plastic, unhappy people; Ben and Rosie's battle against corrupt small town politics is as old as the upstate hills they love. For long stretches, moreover, the stories ...

"Voyage to Somewhere" is the story of Lieutenant Barton and his first command. Some time in May, 1944, Mr. Barton reported to a San Francisco yard to take over his new ship from the lady welders…. Lieutenant Barton and his green hands sailed the SV-126 safely to New Guinea and thereafter, for two years, shuttled her back and forth between steaming tropic islands…. Sloan Wilson 1920– Courtesy of Sloan Wilson...

[Mr. Sloan Wilson] is an eminently proper writer with a shrewd eye to the feminine trade and Hollywood. But although his novel is in no way offensive, it is utterly hollow. In its narrative technique and vision, A Sense of Values suggests a kind of gigantic cliché, spun out over six hundred unruffled pages. The entire design is weary with previous use…. The scenario writer will be able to leave the text intact: "I realized that everything I had to say she already knew. Her hair smelled ...

In the 1920's, all the best people hang out at the Paradise Point Inn, a restricted Lake George hostelry owned by a close-knit association of three families. And the best of this 50 year reprise ["All the Best People"] re-creates the folkways of upper-middle-class life around the Lake during the eras of boom and bust. Mr. Wilson concentrates on two clans, the Stauffers and the Campbells…. As fortunes rise and wane, sailboat racing becomes a psychodrama for family hostilities, lif...

Following up on the success of "Ice Brothers," Sloan Wilson goes down to the sea again to launch a most commendable thriller ["The Greatest Crime"], a tale of drug-running gone awry. Meet Andy Anderson, a reformed alcoholic, a Harvard grad, an itinerant captain and a man in his late 50s who is deeply in love…. A $500-million shipment of cocaine can reach the U.S. from Columbia if assorted pros, from Andy to trigger men to benign government officials, all pull together ...

A literate soap opera, ["Small Town"] tells of middle-aged world-famous journalist, Ben Winslow, who wants to launder the gray years through a return to and possible renewal in his hometown. Life, like the laundry, never comes out sparkling-pure; but Ben, revolving in a continuous cycle of lechery and greed, a nefarious jealous brother, corrupt country-club and corporation politics, emerges clean. The powerful bleaching agent: Love…. ["Small Town" is] clean (no smutty sex ...

[Pacific Interlude] has some of the virtues and many of the vices of traditional war fiction. Examining the invasion of the Philippines from a perspective quite different from the usual hit-the-beaches fare, Wilson focuses on the dangerous lot of a Coast Guard gas tanker…. Unfortunately, the novel's genuinely exciting action sequences take a backseat to a cliché-ridden personal drama centering on the ship's captain, 25-year-old Sylvester Grant…. [Imagine] an earnest Van Jo...

Can sincerity save a badly written book from being dreadful? Sometimes, but not always. [In Small Town], Wilson's obvious earnestness only intensifies the embarrassment of his most mawkish exploration of male menopause. Divorced photographer Ben Winslow comes back to his Vermont hometown from the empty singles life in California—and finds that his alienated teenage son Ebon has been taken in by a farmhouseful of obliging women…. Soon Ben is part of this extended family…. One want...

The sad thing about [A Sense of Values] is that Mr. Wilson, who has talent and at one stage seemed really to care about American society, now writes as if he were himself in the final grip of the exurbanite disease…. As in so much American writing the style is flawless; but it is the sterile flawlessness of the Saturday Evening Post, so that one longs for an occasional lapse of taste or error in the custom-built plot in order to feel that either Mr. Wilson or at least his characters are human.