Customer Reviews

Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture

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It's so nice when a scholar who can write well surveys an area of popular culture that hasn't already been analyzed to death. What David Castronovo does here is give postwar American literature the same sort of critical analysis that we are more used to seeing in books about film or drama. His casts his net wide and brings in a wide and disparate bunch, and sifts them for common themes and anxieties. You get the big familiar leviathans from Hemingway and Salinger, Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, along with the second-tier "serious" writers of the 1950s; and you also get pop names and bestellers from the era (such as the one refered to in the title). But most remarkable is a central chapter called "Angst, Inc." This covers the period's most emblematic type of fiction--that dark, pulpy stuff (Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith) which all seemed so ephemeral at the time but which later got enshrined as "noir"-ish classics. And with good reason. As Castronovo shows, this low-cult fiction, with their themes of obsessive fear and temptation, was just a purer, franker form of the same thing that the high-cult writers of the time were doing. Thus, Lolita (which Castronovo considers shortly afterwards) was basically just a glossier, more professorial version of Jim Thompson.

The book is deceptively small. It's concentrated and rich, like an exceptionally good book-review periodical. I couldn't wait to get through it, so I could go reread (or explore for the first time) the books under discussion.

I picked up this book on a whim, struggled through the introduction, and then became caught in David Castronovo's choices and assessments of books. `This book is about the remarkable literary explosion that took place between the late 1940s and the Kennedy years. It looks closely at the landmark works that are breakthroughs in American literature.'
Would Americans agree that the 1950s was a particularly creative period, and the basis of the modern American spirit? Would Americans agree that American modernism stalled after the 1920s and 1930s? And those of us who are not American: how do we view the authors and books discussed?

The works discussed include Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man); Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), Bernard Malamud (The Magic Barrow); Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man is Hard to Find) in a discussion about moving American literature beyond the borders of naturalism. The novels involved in a discussion about the consciousness of youth include J D Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye); Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Allen Ginsburg (Howl). My favourite part of the book was the discussion around thrillers, which included Cornell Woolrich (I Married a Dead Man); Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me); Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr Ripley) and David Goodis (Down There). I've not read the books included in David Castronovo's discussion about rebellion and the situation of outsiders: Nelson Algren (The Man With the Golden Arm) and Norman Mailer (Advertisements for Myself) but I am tempted.

The further I read into this book, the more interested I became. I am familiar with Vladimir Nabokov's `Lolita' but not with either Dawn Powell's `The Golden Spur' or Randall Jarrell's `Pictures from an Institution'. I am tempted, too, to read Philip Roth's `Goodbye, Columbus' and John Cheever's `The Housebreaker of Shady Hill', along with some other books discussed by David Castronovo.

I don't know enough about 20th century American culture before the 1960s, when it became particularly influential in Australian culture, to appreciate all of the points David Castronovo makes. But it isn't necessary to accept each of these points in order to appreciate that the post-World War II literature has its own energy and to want to read (or reread) the books discussed.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit is my favorite work on non-fiction. Simply the best guide for studying the culture of the 1950s and its lessons that are still relevant for today.