The latest 604-page redundancy by [Sloan Wilson, A Sense of Values,] may … serve a purpose: to stimulate total disenchantment with the disenchantment novel….

Nathan Bond, Author Wilson's protagonist, runs true to formula. In most disenchantment novels, the hero is a non-hero who attends an Ivy League college (Nathan goes to Yale), where he is traumatically snubbed because he lacks good looks or money, the two top things, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. Lacking popularity, the non-hero decides to be different (Nathan wants to be an artist), but he invariably deserts his goal and runs rabbit-scared for life's lettuce (Nathan becomes a cartoonist and creates a Chaplinesque tramp called "Rollo the Magnificent").

But before the non-hero can be properly launched on his affluent career, otherwise known as the rat race, he must have a mate so that he can share his disenchantment. Early snapshots of his beloved are...