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

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.