Word: wains
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...CONTENDERS (278 pp.)-John Wain-St. Martin...
Novelist John Wain, 33, is identified by his British critics and his U.S. publisher as one of the Angry Young Men, but his second novel to cross the Atlantic does not look back in anger. It is a lively, funny story, essentially an American-style narrative about how men make good in a bad way in the big city and learn that success in the end is nothing but dust and ashes...
...barking up the wrong tree. Between the artist who sneers at "gobbets of bourgeois wisdom" and the businessman who is nothing but "a lousy provincial potter," it turns out to be fat, good-natured old Joe who achieves love, wisdom and an upbeat ending for good-natured young Novelist Wain...
Within the triangle of Amis, Osborne and Braine, the rest of the Lucky Jim school is encamped. John Wain (Hurry On Down ) is an Amis in whom the quinine water has changed to straight quinine. Thomas Hinde (Happy As Larry) explores the Welfare State Bohemia with a hero who feels that cadging a livelihood is "more honest," and Peter Towry (It's Warm Inside) writes the comedy of carping domesticity. The upstart philistinism that molds and mars the entire group is succinctly stated by John Braine's hero when he says that everything is "simply a question...
...most significant quarrel that Amis and Co. have with their literary predecessors is not that they had money but that they had causes. As Novelist John Wain puts it: "It was the last age, consciously and feverishly the last, in which people had the feeling that if they only took the trouble to join something, get a party card, wear a special shirt, organise meetings and bellow slogans, they could influence the course of events. Since 1946 nobody above the Jehovah's Witness level has taken this attitude...