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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When Tom Rath, the hero of Sloan Wilson's 1955 novel "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," comes home to Connecticut each day from his job in Manhattan, his wife mixes him a Martini. If he misses the train, he'll duck into the bar at Grand Central Terminal and have a highball, or perhaps a Scotch. On Sunday mornings, Rath and his wife lie around drinking Martinis. Once, Rath takes a tumbler of Martinis to bed, and after finishing it drifts off to sleep. Then his wife wakes him up in the middle of the night, wanting to talk. "I will if you get me a drink," he says. She comes back with a glass half full of ice and gin. "On Greentree Avenue cocktail parties started at seven-thirty, when the men came home from New York, and they usually continued without any dinner until three or four o'clock in the morning," Wilson writes of the tidy neighborhood in Westport where Rath and countless other young, middle-class families live. "Somewhere around nine-thirty in the evening, Martinis and Manhattans would give way to highballs, but the formality of eating anything but hors d'oeuvres in-between had been entirely omitted."
"The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" is about a public-relations specialist who lives in the suburbs, works for a media company in midtown, and worries about money, job security, and educating his children. It was an enormous best-seller. Gregory Peck played Tom Rath in the Hollywood version, and today, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication, many of the themes the novel addresses seem strikingly contemporary. But in other ways "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" is utterly dated. The details are all wrong. Tom Rath, despite an introspective streak, is supposed to be a figure of middle-class normalcy. But by our standards he and almost everyone else in the novel look like alcoholics. The book is supposed to be an argument for the importance of family over career. But Rath's three children--the objects of his sacrifice--are so absent from the narrative and from Rath's consciousness that these days he'd be called an absentee father.
The most discordant note, though, is struck by the account of Rath's experience in the Second World War. He had, it becomes clear, a terrible war. As a paratrooper in Europe, he and his close friend Hank Mahoney find themselves trapped--starving and freezing--behind enemy lines, and end up killing two German sentries in order to take their sheepskin coats. But Rath doesn't quite kill one of them, and Mahoney urges him to finish the job:
Tom had knelt beside the sentry. He had not thought it would be difficult, but the tendons of the boy's neck had proved tough, and suddenly the sentry had started to sit up. In a rage Tom had plunged the knife repeatedly into his throat, ramming it home with all his strength until he had almost severed the head from the body.
At the end of the war, Rath and Mahoney are transferred to the Pacific theatre for the invasion of the island of Karkow. There Rath throws a hand grenade and inadvertently kills his friend. He crawls over to Hank's body, calling out his name. "Tom had put his hand under Mahoney's arm and turned him over," Wilson writes. "Mahoney's entire chest had been torn away, leaving the naked lungs and splintered ribs exposed."
Rath picks...
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