Lhamon's book is an important one. It rescues much of the avant-garde culture of the 1950s from the inclination to align it with mere formalism. As he makes clear, that was the first impulse when works from the likes of Jack Kerouac, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Jackson Pollock, and Chuck Berry first appeared. In the meantime, as the cultural and historical contexts from which they arose has disappeared into time, it is once again the inclination to obsess with formalistic approaches when studying these writers, painters, and musicians.

Lhamon's analysis, on the other hand, discusses the development of lore cycles and, in particular, the displacement of folkore by poplore. His fourth chapter is devoted to a convincing argument of how urban based poplore overtook the rural oriented wellsprings of folkore in the 1950s. It is by far the best chapter in the book, although the subsequent chapters on Kerouac and Jackson Pollock are nearly as mesmerizing in their illustration of poplore at work. The foundational chapter on Ralph Ellison is also convincing, putting that author into what may seem for many a new context.

There are a couple of problems. Generally, Lhamon stalls when writing about music. There is no musical notation in the book, and that is really the only effective way to replicate for a reader who is seeing the sounds he cannot hear on the page. Instead, Deliberate Speed satisfies itself with musical aphorisms supported by a tidal wave of similes, metaphors, and other equivalencies. It just doesn't work.

Then, there is Lhamon's discussion of film. I'm not quite sure he understands film, because almost everything he says relates to themes and performance. That is the stuff of newspaper reviews, not scholarly study. And, frankly, the choice of Rebel Without a Cause as his example of the 1950s' cultural breakthrough cinema is cringeworthy. The film continues not to age well at all--as is the case with the rest of James Dean's star vehicles. Sorry, but it's true. Brando's The Wild One would have been a much better choice.

The same, finally, goes for the last chapter, which devotes itself to Wittgenstein and Thomas Pynchon. I don't care that Pynchon alludes to Wittgenstein. The comparison is forced and awkward. And, ultimately, it is unworkable, as Lhamon uses Pynchon's V as a device to collapse the works of his other subjects into a fitting summary and conclusion. Again, there is a better choice available: John Barth.

As I say, the book overall is important. In fact, I don't think it is possible to make a serious study of overall 1950s culture without looking at it. I do wish that Lhamon had taken some time to look at the more popular instances of mass literature and film from the period. It carried the same impulses, without positioning itself as "elite." For example, there is Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which had a far larger impact during the decade than all the works of literature Lhamon mentions combined. There is also genre fiction, genre films, and genre television, all of which reflected or reacted to the cultural currents Lhamon discusses. More of that, please. ( )

What really makes this book is that in between the critiques of all the specific works in a variety of mediums, Lhamon offers an astute sociological analysis of the process of culture formation, and how the vernacular appropriates that which a given high culture casts aside, on the way to producing the next predominant culture. Lhamon's particular gripe being with the defenders of High Modernism who in the process of defending their preferred space wrote off Fifties America as a cultural wasteland.

However, even though you can color me impressed with this book, I'm left with certain questions. One is that since this study originally came out almost twenty years ago, the variety of post-modernism that Lhamon charts the birth of is becoming a little long in the tooth itself, and one has to wonder whether the process of cultural formation given is a truly a repeatable cycle. This is seeing as Lhamon gave himself the task of examining two types of modernism, one refining itself into oblivion versus one seeking vigor from dissident subcultures. What happens when a truly reactionary culture arises, as sometimes seems to be happening. At that point the Fifties cultural critics who saw High Modernism as being under siege by the kitsch of mass industrial culture might get the last laugh. There are still real folk in this country and they have little use for the products of either High Modernism or the African-American influenced culture of Deliberate Speed.

My other issue with the book is that there's a downside to dealing with a variety of cultural expressions. You really need to have had a good cultural foundation to get the most out of Lhamon's analysis. Not to mention that some illustrations would have been really helpful at points, particularly when the author is dealing with Jackson Pollack and other visual artists. ( )