Word: hingham
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...whirling panorama of slant hatted insurance salesmen, cow-like women, bull-like men, and smiling madmen, Harington weaves a crazy pattern of the present. His starting thread is Hal Hingham, an agent of Arcadia Life, afraid of sales prospects, and frightened of his bulbous, seductive landiady. The image of Hingham the failure is obvious: "The broken, abandoned pencil-sharpener had depressed him. It reminded him of himself. People didn't care how they treated mass-produced equipment." He was a nobody in world that seemed complex and cruel. Even at childhood his father appeared one day only long enough...
...Hingham were a philosopher instead of a life-insurance salesman, he might sum himself up by saying: "I dread, therefore I am." The realest thing about young Hal, a tenth-rate agent for Arcadia Life, is the queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach when he faces his boss, his girl, or anyone else. As he somnambulates through life with a nagging sense of being out of step, people bump into him as if he were invisible, and prospects look out the window when he wants them to sign on the dotted line. Snaps his girl friend Rose...
Moderation Plus Mediocrity. The "revelations" of Dr. Modesto arrive in a large white envelope stamped "CENTRALISM is FOR YOU," and form the core of this uneven but intriguing first novel by Alan Harrington. The doctrine of "Centralism" and what it does to Hal Hingham gives Author Harrington, a Manhattan public-relations man, a slingshot with which to launch provocative pebbles at the panjandrums of selfhelp, the positive thinkers, the conformists, and the problems of 20th-century "adjustment...
...Henry Plus Riesman. Centralism works wonders for Hal Hingham. He moves out of his roach-ridden boardinghouse and into a smart hotel; he gets waiters to seat him where he wishes; he sweeps a startled Rose into bed with her clothes on after a three-year kissless courtship. And in one day on the road, he sells enough insurance to become one of Arcadia's top-ranking salesmen and nearly violate the Centralist rule of moderation...
Despite his seeming success in becoming what Sociologist David Riesman has called an "other-directed" person, Hal Hingham develops a bad case of jitters. At novel's end, he goes in search of the great confidence man himself and, in a sardonic, O. Henry-sudden finale, finds Dr. Modesto rattling the bars in a progressive insane asylum. Hal Hingham is as appealing as he is weak-kneed, and Author Harrington manages to squeeze a wry, comic moral out of his dilemma: self-help is really an inside job, and to pull it off successfully, one must have a self...