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"No Down Payment" by John McParkland. Published in 1957
I bought the book after having seen the movie on TCM. Like the movie, but with more graphic details and more hard punching, the book denounces the happy surface image of Americans living in post-WWII new-housing developments.
It's a very '50s-style big soap opera of a novel with aspirations to place the era's anxieties and fears into a larger philosophical framework of law, religion, faith and beliefs. It works well at building out interpersonal relationships, exposing the characters' inner strife, showing the daily stresses of "keeping up with the Jones" (if that's your thing) and the difficulty of finding faith and purpose in a "soft," "modern" life. It works less well in its efforts to build a substitute or superior system - to wit, it brutally identifies a lot of faults with America in the '50s, but it doesn't offer up many concrete alternatives or solutions.
In an odd way, "No Down Payment" has a reverse echo of an Ayn Rand novel. While - overall - aggressively opposed to Rand's philosophy, like Rand, the novel is preachy and the characters are archetypes who speak in, well, speeches and feel more like representative of ideas than living, breathing people. As with Rand, this approach can work if you're willing to accept it, but it also keeps the reader at a distance as you feel less of a connect to the characters than in a regular novel.
Whether or not a denunciation of the aborning American suburban lifestyle of the '50s is your thing, the good about novels like this is they remind us that many of the issues and problems we, sometime, think are new or unique to our times - automation replacing jobs (big fear in the '50s) or gender roles in a changing society - are not. Also, they just give you more insight - a better "feel -" for the thinking, culture and nuances of the time. That last one is my favorite part about novels like this one.
I bought the book after having seen the movie on TCM. Like the movie, but with more graphic details and more hard punching, the book denounces the happy surface image of Americans living in post-WWII new-housing developments.
It's a very '50s-style big soap opera of a novel with aspirations to place the era's anxieties and fears into a larger philosophical framework of law, religion, faith and beliefs. It works well at building out interpersonal relationships, exposing the characters' inner strife, showing the daily stresses of "keeping up with the Jones" (if that's your thing) and the difficulty of finding faith and purpose in a "soft," "modern" life. It works less well in its efforts to build a substitute or superior system - to wit, it brutally identifies a lot of faults with America in the '50s, but it doesn't offer up many concrete alternatives or solutions.
In an odd way, "No Down Payment" has a reverse echo of an Ayn Rand novel. While - overall - aggressively opposed to Rand's philosophy, like Rand, the novel is preachy and the characters are archetypes who speak in, well, speeches and feel more like representative of ideas than living, breathing people. As with Rand, this approach can work if you're willing to accept it, but it also keeps the reader at a distance as you feel less of a connect to the characters than in a regular novel.
Whether or not a denunciation of the aborning American suburban lifestyle of the '50s is your thing, the good about novels like this is they remind us that many of the issues and problems we, sometime, think are new or unique to our times - automation replacing jobs (big fear in the '50s) or gender roles in a changing society - are not. Also, they just give you more insight - a better "feel -" for the thinking, culture and nuances of the time. That last one is my favorite part about novels like this one.