As calm and serene a garb as a man can wear is the standard gray flannel suit of commerce, a habiliment supposed to betoken solidity of character tastefully touched with quiet nonchalance. Calmness and serenity, however, frantically elude Tom Rath … [the title character of "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit"], and his inward solidity of character peeps forth, in quite pat fashion, only at the end of the narrative.

Rath killed seventeen men as a paratrooper in action in World War II. In Rome, he spent an unblessed honeymoon with Maria, a lovely young lady-of-the-streets whom he picked up in a bar….

Mr. Wilson succeeds in imparting the panicky quality of the lives of … [the] commuters in gray flannel…. The theme is that the dangers and worriments of New York-Connecticut life can be perhaps more difficult to overcome than the more dramatic perils of wartime combat.

This novel … is an interesting but spotty job. It is spotty because it is not easily believable in places. For example, Tom Rath gets a job as public relations officer for Ralph Hopkins, president of the United Broadcasting Company merely by walking into the offices in Radio City, applying for the position (not job), and filling out a brief autobiography. That doesn't seem the way in which such posts are handed out….

Nevertheless, Mr. Wilson does picture the type of decent, postwar man who has a conscience and wonders if he should permit his conscience to rule him out of the big money he needs to provide a lush scale of living for a wife and children, or whether he should become a yes-man, a sort of Jeeves-With-A-Type-writer to a mogul and smother his conscience. Tom Rath keeps faith with the conscience yet he is on the way to the big money at the end, believe it or not.