Slipped Disk

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT (304 pp.)--Sloan Wilson--Simon and Schuster ($3.50).

This is a first novel from the familiar outskirts of suburban discontent where the personalities are sometimes as split-level as the houses. Novelist Sloan Wilson, 35, English instructor at the University of Buffalo, is a small mirror of J. P. Marquand and he has written a kind of Sincerely, Willis Wayde in reverse. His hero is a thirtyish young man who rather naively decides that the only way he can achieve inner peace and fiscal happiness is by selling his soul to a large Manhattan corporation, and starts to do so only to find that 1) he is not Faust, and 2) the corporation is not Mephistopheles, Inc.

Tom Rath, the man in the gray flannel suit, is a run-of-the-treadmill commuter who knows that his $7,000 post with the genteel Schanenhauser Foundation makes him, his wife and three children no more than glorified peons on their cash-conscious street in Westport, Conn. His wife Betsy is a brunette charmer with pronounced but somewhat whimsical notions of budgetary discipline ("No more homogenized milk . . . We're going to save two cents a quart and shake the bottle ourselves").

Intriguing Musk. Stirring the nightly quota of martinis, Tom tells Betsy that he is going to try for a public-relations job with United Broadcasting Corp. As he hurdles tricky interviews in the company's Rockefeller Center headquarters, Tom feels that even the brass-colored elevators carry the intriguing musk of big money. The scent is headiest around U.B.C.'s self-effacing but all-powerful $200,000-a-year president, Ralph Hopkins. It is to Hopkins that Tom is assigned as unofficial braintruster, ghostwriter and aide.

Hopkins sleeps in white silk pajamas, but Tom soon realizes that he is no softie. Behind the manners of a Southern gentleman lurks a mind like a shark's mouth. Hopkins is not only a genius for work but for good works. It is Tom's big chore throughout much of the novel to write a first draft of a Hopkins speech kicking off a national campaign on mental health. Before the speech is finally given, Tom has to take a bumpy ride over his own well-scarred mental highway. It is stalked by the ghosts of 1) the men he killed as a wartime paratrooper, 2) the girl he left pregnant in Rome, 3) his suicide father and the depletion of the family estate.

As he begins to master these fears, Tom finds himself worrying less about becoming a corporate flunky. He even nerves himself to tell Hopkins that he has "serious doubts" about Hopkins' proposed version of the mental-health speech. Far from firing him for his candor, Hopkins respects Tom's honesty and starts to groom him as a top executive.

Nomads of Commuterland. But the pinnacle of success makes Tom dizzy, and he refuses to climb. He tries to explain it all to Betsy: "Why do you think Hopkins is great? Mainly, it's because he never thinks about anything but his work, day and night, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year ... I like Hopkins -- I admire him ... I wouldn't want to be like him."

As the young man with a slipped disk in the backbone of his ambition, Tom Rath has a certain appeal. Though he strains visibly. Author Wilson never lifts His administrative czar Hopkins off the literary blueprints. As a fable of the "tense and frantic" '50s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit catches a little of the social transiency of Commuterland, where the richest nomads in the world fold their $15,000 and $25,000 tents and move on in the family Buick to more exclusive oases. Unfortunately, too much of the novel verges on upper-middle-class soap opera baited with tune-in-tomorrow-for-the-next-upsetting-episode slickness. Author Wilson has something to say, but his title sums up his book better than his story does.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.