Word: wain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...TRAVELLING WOMAN, by John Wain (207 pp.; St. Martin...
Perhaps because he grew up in a drab manufacturing area near Manchester and once wrote about a young man making love to a doxy in an outhouse, Novelist John Wain, 34, has been tarred by British critics with the feathers of the Angry Young Men. Novelist Wain rejects the label-and with good reason. With this novel about marital infidelity as practiced by England's rootless middle class, he identifies himself with a school that looks back not in anger but in languor...
...Novelist Wain's assets are a sharp eye for the social fads and furbelows of suburban England, a sharp ear for the mannered vulgarities of middle-class speech. What the book lacks is either the pulse beat of anger or the tart shivers of satirical laughter...
...that it answers this question better collectively than any one of the semi-articulate Beats and Angries has done on his own. The editors have culled the best from both schools (the U.S.'s Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Clellon Holmes; Britain's Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Osborne) and leavened the lot with sharp-eyed critical commentaries from both sides of the water. U.S. readers will find the Beat section more interesting, if only because it helps to illuminate such postwar phenomena as the James Dean cult, the Elvis Presley and rock-'n'-roll crazes...
Eager to Belong. The Angry Young Men are scarcely beat; yet British reserve merely muffles several striking similarities in theme and attitude. When Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) virtually dismisses politics as a "mug's game," any hipster would reply "Yes, man, yes!" When one of John Wain's characters in Hurry on Down tries to avoid introducing his parents to a friend because he is ashamed of their working-class manner and appearance, there is more than an echo of Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn. When Colin Wilson proclaims that the Outsider "is the one man who knows...