Life at the Top does not, as first sight, seem the most promising place to begin such a reassessment. Its initial reception was mixed and some later criticism actively hostile. In one early study, James Lee described it as a “badly executed novel” that was “an embar­rassment to admirers of Braine’s work”. Others were less severe, but few regarded it as a straightforward success, and for many the book was little more than an attempt to return to a safe sub­ject and set of characters after the relative critical and commercial failure of Braine’s second novel, The Vodi. As a sequel to Room at the Top, it received attention in the press and was also adapted for cinema but neither the book nor the film achieved anything like the success of the earlier works and neither has been much discussed since they were released. Few people who have read Room at the Top now even seem aware that Braine wrote another book about Joe Lampton.

Life at the Top is more difficult to enjoy than Braine’s first novel. Whilst Room at the Top is the Faustian tale of a man de­stroyed by the fulfilment of his desires, its sequel is the claustro­phobic story of an unhappy marriage, unfulfilling adulteries, frus­trated ambitions, and the experience of ageing. Its value lies in the dis­comfort it generates and its lack of resolution. As Richard Hog­gart argued in a characteristically perceptive review, the text re­veals “much more clearly what Mr. Braine’s talented novels have so far really been about – where their undoubtedly strong appeal is founded.” For Hoggart, this is not “nostalgia or brass or brash­ness or even . . . sex” but a “persistent pessimism and anxiety”. Life at the Top shows the evolution of Braine’s re­sponse to con­temporary life, developing and complicating his engagement with the problems at the center of his first book. The novel cannot resolve the contradictions it exposes, a failure demonstrated by what Hoggart described as the “plot-manoeu­vres” of its closing sec­tions. It recognizes the fragmen­tation of life in post-war Brit­ain, the inadequacies of dominant ideas of success and the good life, as well as the inability of the established order to pro­vide satisfactory alternatives. These problems, re­vealed in Joe’s misdirected struggles against the life he has chosen, cannot be solved by returning him to his marriage, family and job at the end of the text or by the revelation that some of the people he has identified as his enemies are more compassionate than he had thought. The anxiety remains, empha­sized rather than obscured by the attempt to achieve closure.

Anxiety takes many forms in the novel, from Hethersett’s fear of immigration, expressed in his desire to leave Leddersford because it “seems to be full of whores and West Indians”, to Joe’s tense encounter with a new youth culture embodied in the threatening “gang” gathered around a basement jazz club. It is best illustrated, though, in the novel’s exploration of masculinity, one of Braine’s recurrent concerns. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement described Joe Lampton as “a caricature of male competitive aggressiveness . . . hunting for new worlds and women to dominate”. Masculinity seems to offer Joe the power and status from which he is otherwise excluded by his working-class background, but the concept proves slippery and evasive. Being a man is never as simple, secure, or rewarding as it appears, and despite his constant efforts he often feels emas­culated, “something less than a man”.