492
PARTISAN REVIEW
true to himself in the search for himself, and if he moderately despairs
in the end and has recourse to a poetic Stoa, at least he knows and
we know how it stands with him.
It
is otherwise with
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
who
is
said to be plowing the same field but who actually exists one whole
spiral beneath Marquand. Tom Rath is interesting as a regression from
whatever authenticity Charles Gray achieves in his recognition of
alienation and the deliverance therefrom, a regression which masquer–
ades as rotation and is not even that. We come upon Tom Rath in the
same promising wasteland as Charles Gray, the everydayness of the
Manhattan-to-suburb axis. His way out is not repetition, however,
but rotation and a remarkably shoddy variety of rotation. It is a de–
vice in which dishonesty is compounded at least twice--once in what
the writer intends to do and again in what he does without intending
to do-to issue in the standard rotative rhythm of the soap opera.
Whatever Marquand's shortcomings, he knows what he can do and he
does it very well. He shows a man in an inauthentic situation and he
explores one interesting alternative to it. Tom Rath, on the other
hand, embarks on a career of bad faith and counterfeit motivation
in which righteous alternatives conceal their opposites.
Marquand's formula might be summed up as suburban alienation
recognized, plus the way out of the Return, plus a gentle disillusion–
ment stoically borne. And this is in fact what happens. Tom Rath's
formula is: alienation recognized, the prevailing marketing orientation
rejected, and a becoming one's authentic self by devoting oneself to
family and the P.T.A.-an admirable turn of events, but this is not
what really happens. Behind this fac;ade an altogether different (and
desperately inauthentic) bid for authenticity is made. A[ least two
concealed reverses can be disentangled from this skein of bad faith.
The first reverse: overtly, the episode with Maria and the be–
getting of an illegitimate child is offered as a wartime lapse, bringing
on a serious crisis in Rath's life which must be faced and surmounted,
with the help of Judge Bernstein/ before the authentic life at home
can be resumed.
1.
In the character of Judge Bernstein, who is like Herman Wouk's Barney
Greenwald, and in the character of the sympathetic Negro sergeant, the author
shows his true affiliation as a compulsive liberal novelist of the Merle Miller
school, which lays down the strict condition that no Negro or J ew may be admitted
to fiction unless he has been previously canonized.
