Presento in questa sede un breve articolo che avevo scritto alcuni anni fa, e che poi per varie ragioni è rimasto nel cassetto.
John Braine (1922-1986) became known to the public for his novels Room at the Top (1957) and Life at the Top (1962). In these novels he tells the story of a man who, having married a well-to-do woman in order “to get to the top,” discovers that he is not accepted by the new people around him. He tries to break away from them, but he returns home to resume his “life at the top.”
Joe Lampton, the hero of Life at the Top, has married Susan Brown, the daughter of his boss, a steel industry owner, in order to “get at the top,” trying to reach the summit of social and economic success for a man of his social extraction. The marriage, however, proves failure. Susan suffers a lack of affection going back to her previous lover [Mark]: “In the sequel Life at the Top [1962], Joe learns by experience the superficiality and aridity of life at the top and the backlash of the torrid love affair which he sacrificed in his climb still trouble him in family life.” ( Blamires, 1983: 33).
Joe’s relations with Susan’s father are strained and difficult, and they come to a crisis when he has a verbal confrontation with his father-in-law at a meeting of the Council. Having returned to his house some time after, Joe has another violent altercation with Susan who confesses that Barbara, one of their children, is Mark’s daughter. Embittered and desperate, Joe tries to escape from all these people he now hates, and he moves to London, staying in a small and a dreary flat with Nora, his new lover. The success of Joe Lampton has sprung from the thematic identification of the readers.
In fact, Joe Lampton reflects in many ways the aims, the ambitions, and even the failure of the typical Angry Young Man in the years following World War II. In his struggle to reach the “top,” Joe finds himself fighting a series of interpersonal conflicts which will bring him down to spiritual defeat: “He seemed to be totally unaware that he himself had approved the compulsory purchase order.” (Braine, 1962:188).
Works Cited
Blamires, H. (1983). A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Braine, J. (1962). Life at the Top. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
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