- Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
When the weather and the traffic permit, and there is no
overtestosteroned bond trader-driven Porsche or Audi ten feet from your
rear bumper, a drive through Connecticut on the leafy Merritt Parkway
offers some of the pleasantest highway motoring on the East Coast. Built
from 1934 through 1940 in the depths of the Depression, this handsomely
landscaped thirty-seven-mile road features a succession of
battlement-like overpasses that whiz by like the slide show for a survey
course in architectural styles from classical, Gothic, and Romanesque
to Beaux Arts, Art Deco and Moderne, and Machine Age designs. The
Merritt winds its tree-lined way through Fairfield County and several of
the most prosperous, desirable, and envied suburban towns in the
country: Greenwich, a haven for billionaires where the leaves and field
stones don’t seem so much cared for as curated; Darien, whose name is
synonymous with upper-class, lacrosse-playing privilege; the rather too
allegorically named but equally flush New Canaan; and Westport, the
spiritual home of the six o’clock martini and Mad Men–era ad
execs. Even Stamford, a sizable city of office parks and buildings, is
tony enough to have served as the home of conservative icon William F.
Buckley and his legendarily social wife, Pat. If there is a stretch of
territory that can be said to deliver definitively, in Herbert Croly’s
resonant phrase, “the Promise of American Life,” it is the gilded towns
of this Gold Coast. Here, the children really are all above average (or
had better be) and can regard as their birthright early admission to
Stanford, Duke, or Princeton, followed by fantastically well-compensated
employment at the country’s most prestigious financial institutions. Or
so the mythology goes.
I have spent hundreds of hours on the Merritt, driving to and from
Cape Cod from and to our home in New York for almost three decades. But
as I try to imagine the lives of the people dwelling in those handsome
houses behind the stone walls and hedgerows, it is not happiness and
prosperity that come to mind, but rather well-appointed misery and a
peculiarly American form of spiritual squalor. Sordid adulteries. Social
climbing and status anxiety. Decaying marriages. Bitter divorces.
Municipal strife. Parents baffled by their children and children
contemptuous of their parents. The corrosive despair of alcoholism.
Class and ethnic prejudice. The thousand worries of real estate. And
many other leading indicators of domestic toxicity. Where would I get
such ideas? From the fiction of Fairfield County, of course, a distinct
and fascinating subset of the literature of suburbia that I have come to
call “the Merritt Parkway Novel.”
I am hardly the first person to have noticed that the fiction of
postwar suburban Connecticut constitutes almost a genre unto itself.
Jonathan Franzen, our designated literary scourge of the upper-middle
class, states in his introduction to the current edition of the ur-Fairfield County novel, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:
“One of the classic settings in fiction, a little world as reassuring
as imperial St. Petersburg or Victorian London, is suburban Connecticut
in the 1950s.” He points out that Wilson’s demiclassic has become, along
with the nonfiction works of social criticism The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man,
“a watchword of fifties conformity,” offering the contemporary reader
“a pure fifties fix,” as indeed it does. What is truly fascinating,
though, is to trace how the themes and conflicts that Wilson so
presciently grappled with—broadly stated, the problem of living a
meaningful and authentic life in the midst of postwar American
prosperity and rapidly shifting values—have morphed and shape-shifted
over five decades of American fiction. The evidence, at least as
presented by today’s novelists, is that happiness on “the crabgrass
frontier” remains elusive and that our ever-increasing freedoms have not
availed us in that quest.
