The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit / by Sloan Wilson

In post-World War II America, Tom Rath is just another New York City businessman. His life revolves his job to which he commutes by train every morning, his wife Betsy and their three young children. As modest middle-class Americans, Tom and his family are just trying to make ends meet. So when an offer for a riskier but higher paying job comes his way, he takes it. The gamble pays off. Before long Tom catches the eye of his new boss Ralph Hopkins who wishes him to be his personal assistant, a prestigious but far more rigorous position meaning Tom will now have to choose between becoming a workaholic businessman or be just another 9-to-5-er who at least has time for his family. As he mulls his options, his homelife becomes more complicated. His only living relative, a grandmother, has died and left her estate home to Tom who now has to decide if he and his family should live on the property or accept the offer to sell the land as a potential housing project.

There's something else too. Even ten years later, the war is never far from Tom's thoughts. On his way to and from work, he reminisces about his harrowing combat experience as an Army paratrooper, the violence involved in killing enemy soldiers at close range and the loss of his best friend (partly of his own error). There's also a girl he knew in Rome, an Italian refugee named Maria, whom he'd had an affair with while on leave. When by chance he meets an old Army buddy and learns that Maria gave birth to his son after he left Italy, he must decide between keeping the love child a secret, hoping he can somehow forget about it, or letting his wife know and hope she'll understand. For Tom Rath, just another man on the street in a gray flannel suit, it seems like the entire world is held in the balance.

Penned in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is the quintissential 1950's story, one which entails the baby boom of the post war years, the suburbanization of American families, expanding American enterprise and the still lingering after effects of the war itself. Rath is a great character (Gregory Peck as Tom in the 1956 film version gave a sound performance). A man of admirable qualities, he's also plagued by many problems. Reading about Tom, the time and place he inhabits and the life which pulls him in so many different directions, creates intrigue about every aspect of the book right down to the peculiarly sad life of mega-mogul Ralph Hopkins. Here we see an individual feeling the grind of the corporate sinkhole, the decentralization of home and work, the burden of an ambitious wife and, not to be sold short, the first real problems confronting American veterans in quite some time. The book is a solid snapshot of an American decade more associated with conformity and standardization than indecision and uncertainty. Touching on the kind of America Updike would depict a decade later, it is one which brilliantly concentrates all of the trials and inadequacies, the ambiguity and suspicion inherent in post-war life into one identifiable character and condition. (FIC WILSON)

Matters of Honor / by Louis Begley

American author Louis Begley is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel About Schmidt, a book later adapted into a same titled, Oscar-nominated film starring Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates. Born Ludwik Begleiter in Poland in 1933, Begley survived the deadly World War II genocide of all Polish Jews (he's Jewish) with aid from a compassionate Catholic family who helped hide he and his parents from the Gestapo. After the war, the Begleiters immigrated to America where the family Americanized their name and Ludwik Begleiter officially became Louis Begley. Upon graduating from Harvard, he married and had children, served for a time in the US Army and later went to law school. Despite only beginning his career as a novelist in the early 1990's (when he was in his sixties and still practicing law), Begley has carved out quite a career for himself publishing 8 novels, all well-received. Matters of Honor, Begley's latest published in 2007 is also his most autobiographical observing the relationship of three Harvard University friends in the mid-fifties.

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Thrown together as freshman roommates at Harvard in the fall of 1954, Sam Standish, Archibald P. Palmer III ("Archie") and Henry White quickly hit it off, bonding through their mutual affinity for women, alcohol and other 'gentlemanly' pursuits. On their own for what's really the first time, none feel the least bit homesick. Rather each has reason to put some distance between home and school and would rather establish new identities within the collegiate microcosm than dwell on where they came from. Blue-blooded Sam would seem the most prototypical Ivy Leaguer with his New England roots, an established family name, old money wealth and a boarding school upbringing. Yet that's exactly the classification he wants to separate himself as any silver spoon perks he does have are smoke and mirrors. In all honesty, Sam's parents are a public embarassment: his father's a notorious drunk and his slatternly mother's well-known for her parade of casual affairs. If that weren't reason enough to seclude himself from his preppy brethren, there's the fact that he's also adopted--a secret only he, his parents and the family lawyer know about.

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As a lifelong military brat, Archie has no real roots other than wherever his father's been stationed and nothing so exceptional for a surname absent the deceptively prestigious roman numeral at the end giving off the suspicion of elite breeding. His easy manners and worldwise nature never find him without friends and, consequently, never without a free drink in his hand or a fun-loving girl on his arm. Diametrically opposite of Sam and Archie is Henry, a New York City native who got into Harvard on full academic scholarship. Despite attending one of the crummiest public high schools in Brooklyn, he's nevertheless among of the smartest, most well-read and hardest-working freshman students around. Henry's no nerdy outsider though. His booksmarts and unfashionable looks don't offset his equally acute knack for adapting and fitting in. Just like the other two though, Henry has his uncomfortable past issues which he'd prefer not to get into: he's Jewish, a Polish immigrant, he hid in a cellar during the Gestapo raids, all extended family apart from he and his parents were gassed, etc. On the surface, Henry's tragic past doesn't seem too encumbering. He's upbeat and on top of things mostly, into girls and good times and happy to be out of earshot of his squawking mother, until the day everything changes bringing the three friends into contact with a daunting truth and a decision which could haunt their lives forever.
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Begley knows how to tell a story. Even writing about the holocaust, a genre so top heavy with personalized fiction accounts, the author's ability to peak a reader's interest is remarkable. He writes with a sort of casually sedated style, relaying information about each character with practiced nonchalance. Somehow this gives the story an alarming level of assiduity, the reader keen on all of the subtle moods and motives of the trio of friends who seem like your closest kin (imperfections and all) rather than literary characters. Narrated in past tense by Sam recollects everything from first impressions to girlfriends to nights out on the town as the book moves along at a solid pace, never revealing too much too fast yet offering enough crumbs for the reader to keep the pages turning as the accessible prose slyly allows everyone in to the lives of the three protagonists. (FIC BEGLEY)

The Reader / by Bernhard Schlink

Post World War II Germany was both a pivotal time and place; the country ravaged by war, its population decimated, its people torn and relationships severed. In Berlin, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is on his way home from school one day when he suddenly falls ill, collapsing on the side of the street and awakening later to find himself in the company of his rescuer, a beautiful woman named Hannah Schmitz. Despite the fact that she's a war widow twice his age, Hannah and Michael are soon entangled into a passionate love affair, the two forming an almost ethereal bond, sharing their lives, secrets, pasts and most intimate of intimacies. It lasts three months until the day Hannah inexplicably disappears, vanishing without a trace.

It is ten years before they meet again. When Michael does once again finally see his beloved--who he’s only been obsessing about every day for the last decade--he is a law student at the university and Hannah is in court, standing trial for an unspeakable crime Michael was never aware of. Only now, as the trial progresses, does Michael realize the terrible secret Hannah has been guarding all these years, a secret she has up to now considered too shameful to tell anyone, even Michael. Schlink, a former judge turned full-time author who lives in Berlin, has crafted a breathtaking tale of love, passion and coming of age. An Oprah Book Club book and bestseller following its release in Germany in 1995, The Reader is a compelling read, “ensnaring both the heart and mind”* with its moving tale about a young man's confrontation with love and the loss of innocence.

*L.A. Times Book Review