Sloan Wilson, a Harvard graduate, first wrote a 1947 book based on his wartime experiences but The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was his next novel, and I'm guessing that it is probably the one I'll end up loving the most.
Even more than his A Summer Place that I wrote about in July that was written after this one.
I loved this 1955 book!
As usual, the best way I can think of to tell you about a book is to let the author's words speak for themselves, so here are some excerpts from Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:
When Tom stepped off the train at Westport that night, he stood among a crowd of men and looked toward the corner of the station where Betsy usually waited for him. She was there, and involuntarily his pace quickened at the sight of her. After almost twelve years of marriage, he was still not quite used to his good fortune at having acquired such a pretty wife. Even with her light-brown hair somewhat tousled, as it was now, she looked wonderful to him. The slightly rumpled cotton house dress she was wearing innocently displayed her slim-waisted but full figure to advantage, and although she looked a little tired, her smile was bright and youthful as she waved to him.
Later in the book, Betsy recognizes that they haven't really been trying to succeed, not in their marriage, Tom not in his career, not as parents. They've sort of been drifting along and she gets up early one morning determined to start her family on a more purposeful track.
When he went downstairs, he heard a coffeepot percolating. The coffee smelled good. In the kitchen he found the breakfast table fully set and waffles cooking. "What's going on?" he asked Betsy.
"Breakfast," she said. "No more instant coffee. No more grabbing a piece of toast to eat on the way to the station. We're going to start living sanely....No more hotdogs and hamburgers for dinner," Betsy said. "I'm going to start making stews and casseroles and roasts and things....No more television, I'm going to give the damn set away...we're going to sit in a family group and read aloud...And we're going to church every Sunday. We're going to stop lying around Sunday mornings, drinking Martinis. We're going to church in a family group...We ought to start doing the things we believe in...We've got a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we better start now."
Naturally there is crisis after crisis in the book. Tom has gone to work as an assistant to a major radio and television network in New York, an industry where men get ahead by agreeing with their bosses. Tom becomes pretty good at this until it sticks in his craw.
Tom wonders whether to tell his boss the truth about a project concerning a pioneering project focusing on mental illness in America, a subject that was practically tabu in American society then:
And if he finds that I disagree with everything he wants to do, what good am I to him? I should quit if I don't like what he does, but I want to eat, and so, like a half million other guys in gray flannel suits, I'll always pretend to agree, until I get big enough to be honest without being hurt.
By the end of the book he tells his wife:
"I really don't know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness--they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit."
Obviously I liked this book because of the time period it was set in. I grew up in this time of the 1950s. The characters were familiar types to me. I understood them.
So I hesitate to recommend this book to readers who aren't of that era or who don't enjoy reading about that time.
That's my fair warning but let me add two more sentences from the book that sum up why I think this author has the talent of making the reader be in the story.
That afternoon Tom boarded a plane and sat down in one of the comfortably upholstered seats. As the plane gunned its engines and began the familiar headlong, all of nothing, rush down the runway, he fastened his safety belt and leaned back, still wondering what Hopkins wanted to see him about.
It was that one phrase, "As the plane gunned its engines and began the familiar headlong, all or nothing, rush down the runway..." that brought back that butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling that I used to get in airplanes of the 1950s, all while I was sitting in my reading chair in 2018.
A little thing, perhaps, but this whole book made me feel as if I were there, part of that period.
That's a peek at this lovely 1950s book that was followed by the movie of the same name starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones, a favorite movie of mine, and a peek into our kitchen after RH and our sons Zack and Gurn tore out the ugly old loose tiles and replaced them with planks of Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring.
It took me an hour standing in Home Depot last January to choose from the samples. Everything except this one was the look of wood flooring but this one called Scratch Stone lived up to it's name, looking like stone, not wood.
I'll do a post at Dewena's Window soon with photos of the whole kitchen as soon as everything is completed. The guys also painted out the old yellow walls and there's still one more small section to paint.
But I do love this pretty floor so much, especially on a rainy gray day that is perfect for reading.
Link to the flooring I chose here.
