THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT, a truly excellent book about conformity's immense costs

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT
Sloan Wilson
Da Capo Press
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Universally acclaimed when first published in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit captured the mood of a generation. Its title—like Catch-22 and Fahrenheit 451—has become a part of America's cultural vocabulary. Tom Rath doesn't want anything extraordinary out of life: just a decent home, enough money to support his family, and a career that won't crush his spirit. After returning from World War II, he takes a PR job at a television network. It is inane, dehumanizing work. But when a series of personal crises force him to reexamine his priorities—and take responsibility for his past—he is finally moved to carve out an identity for himself.

This is Sloan Wilson's searing indictment of a society that had just begun to lose touch with its citizens. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a classic of American literature and the basis of the award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

My Review: 1955. That is, if you're math-challenged, 65 years ago, and the year that Simon & Schuster published this book. So Wilson was writing it in, it's safe to say, 1953 (67 years ago). And this is what Sloan Wilson said:

Money, I need money, {Tom} thought. If they don't build a new public school, I should be able to afford a private school. I should get everything but money out of my head and really do a job for Hopkins. I ought to be at work now....
Money, Tom thought. The housing project could make money, but it depends on re-zoning, and Bernstein says we shouldn't ask for that until they vote on a new school.
A new school, he thought—so much depends on that! ... I should work for a new school, and I should work harder for Hopkins, and I should be making plans for our housing project. Where did I ever get the idea that life is supposed to be anything but work? A man's work should be his pleasure—I shouldn't expect anything more.

Tom Rath has just been to see the overcrowded public school his daughters have to attend because, unlike his own father, he can't afford to put them in a private school. He muses on these thoughts while waiting for a late commuter train into the city, where he will take on a lowly personal assistant's position and, in the process, displace a number of female employees from their physical space.

Sixty-seven years...eleven legitimate Presidencies...since Author Wilson was penning these words, and not that much has changed. Now, of course, it could easily be a mom having these platform reveries, because we've been sold the bill of goods that nannies and au pairs are plenty good enough to raise the kids we've had but don't feel like raising even if it means NOT having a home theater, six DVR-equipped TVs, and each kid with an unshared Xbox. If mom's better at business, dad, YOU stay home and raise those people you engendered. Read to them, make them a snack after carpool, help with their homework. Hiring out parenthood sorta makes it pointless, doesn't it?

Ahem.

Me and my rants.

Author Wilson's book analyzes the sources of Tom's inner discontent as disconnection and materialism. I agree. The alarm bell sounded by this, and by the 1956 movie, went unheeded despite the fact that both were hugely popular and successful in their own spheres. (The movie was popularly supposed to be as good as the book, for once.)

At every turn, MONEY the getting and spending of, obsesses and defines Tom. His wealthy grandmother is being cared for by a greedy granny-nanny, and the hijinks appertaining thereto are most instructive for today's audience. Tom's boss, the venal and piggish Hopkins, plays out before Tom's increasingly revolted gaze his own probable future of alienated kid (extra probable because his three are TV obsessed brats), estranged wife, and grasping mistress(es). Then things get complicated when a wartime indiscretion with an Italian lass provides a surprise to Tom's unsuspecting wife.

Sloan Wilson wrote of his own time. Change the props, update the clothes, and make it about Betsy the wife, and nothing much has changed.

I'm sad about that. So much needless hurt caused in this world from sheer, wasteful greed for MORE when there's more than enough right in front of these hungry-souled people.

About the 1956 film, well...I can only offer as my not-inexperienced opinion that it was turgid, slow-moving, and in the end not up to the bar set by the novel. Gregory Peck was damned good and dull as Tom; Jennifer Jones was much better as Betsy. And can you *even* with the way this went through the studio system! A bit less than a year between publishing on 18 July 1955 to Nunnally Johnson's writer/director's chair for release 12 April 1956! I really want to know the story behind that one.