LOVE AFTER FIVE

    I suppose there are statistics on this somewhere, but from what I’ve been reading I’d say middle-class people in the 1950s did a lot of drinking. Five cocktails before dinner were nothing. A couple of bottles of wine during the meal had no impact. A few more shots afterward produced only a pleasant glow. In Love after Five the protagonist, a business executive, at least dimly understands that he sometimes drinks too much. No one faults him for it, presumably because that's exactly what everyone expects.

    Love after Five by Raymond Mason. Fawcett Gold Medal (1956), 160 pp.
    Tony Albertson is only thirty-one and already vice-president in charge of marketing for a successful San Francisco paint company. His boss, Mort Custer, is about to retire and apparently favors Tony to be his successor. Tony is pretty sure he wants the job, but he’s less certain about his love life. Ann, his girlfriend, provides no spark, while Penelope, the boss’s wife, keeps propositioning him. Then Zoe, the girlfriend from high school about whom he daydreams, shows up hoping to make up for lost time. Meanwhile, Tony has come to notice that Stella, his longtime secretary, is not only loyal and efficient but extremely attractive as well.
    This book might be considered Gold Medal’s answer to Executive Suite or The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Tony works hard, appreciates his success, but is growing tired of the corporate rat race. Loveless bachelorhood is the problem, and Tony must endure episodes of self-doubt and hard drinking before he finds the solution. (The reader will be way ahead of him.) Unfortunately, neither he nor the other characters in the book are especially sympathetic or compelling. The exception is Zoe, whose partying and gay friends raise Tony’s defenses against the unconventional. The story ends implausibly though not surprisingly. The book reads easily but is today probably of more historical than literary interest.