After the poor reviews and sales of his second novel,
The Vodi(1959), John Braine (1922-86) returned in his third novel,
Life at the Top(1962), to Joe Lampton, the protagonist of his successful first novel,
Room at The Top(1957). In
Life, as in
Room, Joe tells his own story, but focuses on a later stage in his life, though he sometimes looks back. At the end of
Room, he was about to wed the young woman he had made pregnant, Susan Brown, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist; but he was also in mourning for his married lover, Alice Aisgill, whom he had rejected for Susan and who had died, perhaps intentionally in response to this rejection, in a horrific car crash.
Life runs to 288 pages, a fairly standard size for a novel in the 1960s, and has 26 chapters. When it opens, Joe, now 35
2931 words
Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Life at the Top". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 April 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35628, accessed 27 November 2024.]
