The Graduate

Writing a novel that is 85 percent dialogue must have been a challenge, but Charles Webb was mostly up to it. Where The Graduate succeeds is in presenting a very cool, distanced critique of suburban middle class values, or more accurately the lack of values parading as such. This is old hat by now, and when done today it comes off as sneering and pompous, but there was still something worth saying on the subject in 1963 when the novel was published. The dialogue can annoy at times, as when the characters repeat each other and ask questions without question marks, but this I suspect is all part of the plan of presenting a very specific world of alienation and meaninglessness. One advantage of the reliance on dialogue is that the reader never has to endure digressions about motivations and feelings – the characters simply act. The reader can fill in the rest.