synopsis:

this book focuses on Arthur Seaton who endures working in a factory all week so that he can afford to drink and chase women on Saturday evening. He lives day-to-day, insisting "All I want is a good time. The rest is propaganda." Arthur is intelligent enough to know how to indulge his vices but lacks the wisdom to understand that he is drinking and wenching away what few prospects he has to improve his situation. It is unclear whether or not Arthur really wishes to do so. While continuing an affair with Brenda, the bored and restless wife of his friend Bert, Albert also becomes involved with Doreen Gretton whose own ambitions seem limited to getting married and starting a family. neither Arthur nor Brenda seems especially concerned about, much less rebellious against the limits imposed on them within their class-based industrial society.an unwanted pregnancy impacts on all the central characters and threatens to derail Seaton's hedonistic lifestyle. He is forced to conform outwardly to gray, middle-class values and choose between staid good girl, Doreen and the sexually liberated Brenda.

on this book:

sillitoe describes the suffocation of everyday life in Arthur's self-indulgent hedonism, indifference to the feelings of others, and callous betrayal of what little he has going for him. he comments in his introduction to the novel published in 1979:"Many people make the mistake of assuming that the novel is autobiographical, as they did when it first appeared. It is not, at least in the strictest sense of the word. When I was writing it, I had not been in a factory for ten years. But the novel, while mirroring the sort of atmosphere I grew up in, is a work of the imagination in that all the actors in it are put together from jigsaw pieces assembled so that no identifiable characters came out at the end. I imagine novelists of the middle-class condition also perform in this way.

I had no theme in my head except the joy of writing, the sweat of writing clearly and truthfully, the work of trying to portray ordinary people as I knew them, and in such a way that they would recognize themselves. This took me a long time to achieve, and was more difficult than one might imagine."in 1960 a film based on this novel came out.