["What Shall We Wear to This Party?", the] autobiography of the man who wrote "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," seems to promise some unpromising confessions—self-hatred, divorce, alcoholism, middle-aged romantic yearnings, nostalgia about a faded WASP propriety, hapless vanity, Internal Revenue problems, an uneasy Harvard boy now lurking in the body of a grandfather. And, indeed, it delivers this load of splintered kindling. Yet this book, after eight novels, which led many readers to think Sloan Wilson had no surprises in him, is finally touching, charming, and revelatory in the best way—it tells what the author knows and also more than he knows. It is a near miss at summing up the experience of a generation, marred mostly by a hastily sentimental running down at the end, which is itself a symptom of the life his career has attempted to define….

Whatever Sloan Wilson offers...