Wyndham Lewis' Taxi-Cab-Driver Test: 3. "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" by Sloan Wilson.

For an explanation of the Test, see the first number in this series. Here now is the first page of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson (no relation).

By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths. The ragged lawn and weed-filled garden proclaimed to passers-by and the neighbors that Thomas R. Rath and his family disliked "working around the place" and couldn't afford to pay someone else to do it. The interior of the house was even more vengeful. In the living room there was a big dent in the plaster near the floor, with a huge crack curving up from it in the shape of a question mark. That wall was damaged in the fall of 1952, when, after struggling for months to pay up the back bills, Tom came home one night to find that Betsy had bought a cut-glass vase for forty dollars. Such an extravagant gesture was utterly unlike her, at least since the war. Betsy was a conscientious household manager, and usually when she did something Tom didn't like, they talked the matter over with careful reasonableness. But on that particular night, Tom was tired and worried because he himself had just spent seventy dollars on a new suit he felt he needed to dress properly for his business, and at the climax of a heated argument, he picked up the vase and heaved it against the wall. The heavy glass shattered, the plaster cracked and two of the lathes behind it broke. The next morning, Tom and Betsy worked together on their knees to patch the plaster, and they repainted the whole wall, but when the paint dried, the big dent near the floor with the crack curving up from it almost to the ceiling in the shape of a question was still clearly visible. The fact that the crack was in the shape of a question mark did not seem symbolic to Tom and Betsy, nor even amusing - it was just annoying. Its peculiar shape caused people to stare at it abstractedly, and once at a cocktail party one of the guests who had had a little too much to drink said, "Say, that's funny. Did you ever notice that big question mark on your wall?"
   "It's only a crack," Tom replied.
   "But why should it be in the shape of a question mark?"
   "It's just coincidence."
   "That's funny," the guest said.

   The response of some readers may be that, in contrast to the previous two novels tested, this is not a literary novel. I would contend that such a response represents a vulgar idea of the 'literary' as something dense and overstocked with conceits. By the 'literary' I would rather understand writing in which the subject-matter and the surface of the words are given equal attention, with neither predominating. In the present case, the author's art takes the form of making this surface completely transparent, virtually avoiding metaphor and other rhetorical figures (the only conspicuous example of rhetoric is his personification of the house as vengeful and having an evil genius) , concentrating on putting the right word in its right place, and ensuring that his sentences are well-balanced and sinewy. In further pursuit of this ideal, Wilson also avoids encumbering his two opening paragraphs with a mass of personal background material. Thus, the characters are introduced en passant, and the reader is left, for instance, to make the inference that Betsy is Tom's wife.
   Who, then, are these characters? In Tom and Betsy we encounter a couple for whom the American Dream has not quite materialised. They lack the disposable income even to get the plaster repaired in their living room. They appear to emulate smart society by holding cocktail parties, but only because they haven't the resources to give their guests dinner. Is all this about to change, and if so, for the better or for the worse? Does either of them have a past? To find out, you'll have to read the novel. Anyway, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit passes the Test, and I'm currently reading it.
   The novel was reissued as a paperback in 2002, but as it was a best-seller when it was first published in 1955, there are second-hand hardbacks to be had online. It was also made into a film, released in 1956.