Mr. Wylie's Atomic Dud
GOLDBERG, PAULA
Mr. Wylie's Atomic Dud Tomorrow! By Philip Wylie. Rinehart. 372 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Paula Goldberg Free-lance writer; former Associate Editor, the "Hatworker" We have had any number of reports...
...It is hard to wash out the image of catastrophe we have all been carrying somewhere in the back of the mind for the past nine years...
...Even Mr...
...But the horrors of Judgment Day fail to move...
...Since I am one of these unfortunates, I approached Philip Wylie's latest book with caution—especially since the jacket blurb promised "a shattering, vivid experience of the nightmare which Twentieth-Century Man has cooked up for himself...
...His message is our lack of preparedness for a war which may be imminent...
...Wylie had already tackled a world fire-bath in a mixture of whimsy and gore entitled The Disappearance...
...In fact, you can easily develop a sensitivity to imaginary hydrogen bombs, especially if you read the daily papers and are skittish to begin with...
...More constructive defense action would help lift the tension, conscious or unconscious, felt by almost all, but the tension itself evidently does not provide motive power toward joining Civil Defense...
...Wylie's special brand of rhetoric, movingly employed in some of his other books, seems to have failed him...
...We will cease to believe it can happen...
...Like the rest of his warning, they defeat their own purpose...
...They parade through a good part of the book, with nothing but shock value, like bloody sideshows...
...His second treatment is supposedly pure realism...
...There is, however, a cast...
...The conversation is that of some peculiarly unperceptive, thick-tongued, stodgy race with a Midwestern drawl...
...former Associate Editor, the "Hatworker" We have had any number of reports on the Third World War, with and without pictures...
...Some of these characters are "types...
...It is amazing, considering Wylie's one-time agile style...
...This might not be whimsy if there were people in the population...
...After years of minor international bickering and appeasement, he says, we will become smug...
...Others are less—only names...
...We may even strike atom bombs and civil defense out of our conversations and textbooks because there is no sense in needlessly frightening the children...
...An unconvincing scare like Tomorrow...
...And it is a pity...
...can only do what Wylie so pessimistically prophesies —deaden the ear and paralyze action...
...Never before has a war been so well covered before its outbreak...
...It concerns the Average American Town with its Average American Main Street with its Average American, etc...
...It includes a tyrannical rich old woman, an agnostic humanitarian editor, a lower-middle-class family without principles or warmth, gangsters, mobs, children, and a President of the United States...
Vol. 37 • February 1954 • No. 7
