Room at the Top

The theme of a young man on the make had already been done better by Thackeray and Dreiser when this novel by John Braine was published in 1957, but Braine succeeds as an agreeable stylist with a sharp eye for the details of human behavior. The dated rendering of some of the dialogue into overblown, faux adult flirting can be excused given the novel's timelessness in other aspects, such as demonstrating the eternal and related pulls of greed and love.