What Makes Joe Lampton Run?
RUMNEY, MICHAEL R.
What Makes Joe Lampton Run? Room at the Top. By John Braine. Houghton Mifflin. 301 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Michael R. Rumney By tradition the south of England (London, the two university towns,...
...Susan can afford to have her child aborted, but it is an opportunity for real wealth lost...
...family life is strong among working-class persons and life without a sense of responsibility to his mother (or Alice) is inconceivable to Joe...
...Alice, in half-accident, half-suicide, is killed in an auto crash, and Joe feels very guilty...
...From a variety of motives, one being his ambition, another curiosity, Joe seduces her and later discovers she is pregnant...
...But where Stendhal, the genius, saw the predicament of a sick society, John Braine, the slick writer, sees only the individual case...
...He considers breaking off the affair for a while and only overcomes his disgust after he reflects that she is, after all, of the propertied classes who are allowed failings of this sort...
...Now Joe finds himself in a dilemma...
...After a discussion of realpolitik with Susan's father, Joe's engagement is announced...
...What more should one ask...
...Thus, it is implied, the projection of a mother-role into Alice caused his feelings of guilt...
...The idealization of wealth—it is still a value even if Joe does not find it all he wished for—and the deep respect for the Upper Classes (not really distinguished from the merely moneyed-classes) mark this book as an essay in romantic power-worship...
...Alice loves him and is prepared to leave her husband for him...
...Room at the Top has, on a much lower level, the same mixture of irony and romanticism as he Rouge et le Noir...
...although Alice is a true love fas he says himself—she was a substitute for both his mother and father, lost in the war), Joe cannot resist Susan, the pretty, spoiled daughter of a powerful industrialist...
...it concerns the local rich, their lives and entertainments and morals, and describes them against the background of the huge, sordid and sooty industrial machine...
...Reviewed by Michael R. Rumney By tradition the south of England (London, the two university towns, and the once fashionable watering places, Bath and Brighton) is aristocratic, elegant, leisurely and decadent...
...However, for purely entertainment purposes, Room at the Top has pace, style, motion and readability...
...But not for long...
...Their clandestine affair seems a respite from his ambition...
...He joins a community dramatic group in which he finds the local rich, and in the process meets Alice, a somewhat older woman to whom he becomes deeply attached...
...Room at the Top is a novel which could only take place in the industrial area...
...D. H. Lawrence "discovered" her first...
...We remember, too, how seriously John Osborne's Jimmy Porter took his own loyalties...
...It is about a young man who, with apparently dire consequences for the world of manners, culture and taste, is on the way "up," by which is meant an income of over ?3,000 a year...
...Joe Lampton comes from a northern industrial towns—dirty, sordid and poor, with rows of identical houses in which children grow up with identical prejudices...
...The relative importance of the mother seems to be a product of the working class book...
...Room at the Top is full of the vital horror of the north, where a man is judged by his "brass" and the polite ways of the south are considered weakness...
...Again, when Alice is killed, Joe feels guilty because he has not emancipated himself from his class loyalty...
...Joe, however, manages to become some sort of accountant and moves to a suburb to set up in the local bureaucracy...
...It is the moral assumptions of the book which provide the interest in this novel...
...When he finds that Alice has posed nude for an artist in her younger days, he is shocked...
...The north of England (Newcastle, Wigan, Sheffield and the industrial areas) is hardworking, productive, religious and strong...
...The pieties which Joe accepts are those of his working-class background...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 42
