The flap about [The Chapman Report's] overt sexuality was less than justified, especially when that novel is compared with The Sins of Philip Fleming. The earlier novel was much more sexually explicit, but no one bothered to attack it. The sexual controversy overlapped into the charges that Wallace had manufactured a bestseller by stringing together frantic sex with a scant story line. But if sex sold Chapman, then sex should have sold Fleming.

Wallace wrote Chapman because he wanted to write about married women and their problems—the sexual problems being minor compared to the insensitivity and stupidity of men. Thematically, Chapman is less about sexual matters than about the tensions of suburbia and how they are manifested in a variety of unhappy ways. If Chapman was bought and read for its sex, then many readers were disappointed. As Wallace told the Italian press after the novel was temporarily banned in Italy:

I have not and cannot write obscenely or immorally. I have written of love and sex in candid terms, and I shall again. In The Chapman Report I was writing not to stimulate, but to reflect an area of American society with which I am deeply acquainted. Too, I wished to explore certain aspects of female unhappiness and frustration in today's world. I wrote of American women I know—but perhaps I wrote of all women.

                                        (p. 118)

Wallace's early mail came from middle-aged readers. By the late 1960's the majority of the fan mail was coming from high school and college students, and young people in their twenties or early thirties. "I couldn't fathom this at first, and finally I came to understand it. I had been, when I wrote The Prize, exactly where the maturing young people are today—suspicious of institutions, of bigness, of authority. In The Prize I had taken a sacred international institution, The Nobel Foundation, and I exposed the frailties of the institution, its politics, cynicism, pettiness. In search of truth I had traversed where our young would soon be marching. To have produced a work that would be respected and used by our young—well, that was truly gratifying." (pp. 124, 127)

What The Chapman Report owed to sex research was what The Three Sirens owed to anthropological forays into the South Seas, notably Margaret Mead's The Coming of Age in Samoa. Both novels were loosely based on a scientific activity that numerous people were involved in and some became famous for. No more, no less.

In The Three Sirens an American team of anthropologists and laymen descend upon a hidden Polynesian island to study a unique and hitherto undiscovered way of life. In the process they find that their own life styles need careful examination—perhaps more so than the lives of the natives. (p. 127)

If The Three Sirens dealt with anthropology, a subject not of general interest to the public, The Man, Wallace's next book, would touch two subjects that dominated our concerns from the early years of the 1960's until today—the death, or removal from office by impeachment, of a president, and the plight of Black America.

From the early 1950's Wallace had been eager to write a novel based on the situation of the Negro in contemporary America. He developed two novels and shelved both. He thought they added nothing to what had already been said well by Black authors. (p. 129)

Wallace's recurring interest in fact and fantasy has continuously dominated his writing, and the same fundamental questions have been raised again and again. Whatever the setting in whichever work, they are roughly these: What are the unique and shared problems of male and female in our society? How can an individual endure the social, psychological, physical and financial pressures of modern life and still be whole? Above all, where is the order and sense of it all?

In all of his novels Wallace has tried to tell readable, enjoyable stories, integrating plausible characters and thematic relevancies. In The Sins of Philip Fleming he tried to show how the pressures of career and marriage can render a man psychologically and physically impotent. In The Chapman Report he tried to reveal how the modern woman endures a multitude of indignities which leave her unfulfilled and unhappy, and how the modern means of learning the truth about her, as by sexual surveys, cannot reach the truth and can often do harm. In The Prize he investigated the meaning of success in contemporary society and sought to reveal the rickety facades of public honor and the latent strength within private failures. In The Three Sirens he wanted to show the restrictions and inhibitions imposed by artificial custom upon the lives of modern men and women, and to speculate on how they might learn from those they call uncivilized. In The Man he attacked the madness of racial prejudice and affirmed the intrinsic value as well as the human weaknesses beneath the skin of every individual. In The Plot he dealt with the central issue of our time, the possibility of nuclear destruction, and how men and women suffering our own sense of helplessness and fear can still affirm the worth of life. In The Seven Minutes he spoke out against moral prejudice and tried to show how censorship is a subtle form of the fear we ought to fear. In The Word he detailed modern man's lack of faith and his longing and need for that faith, and how our deepest personal problems are ineffable without a recognition of their spiritual roots. And in The Fan Club he described the sad and disturbing America that defines masculinity and femininity in terms of sex and power. (pp. 181-82)