When academic books are expected to achieve broad audience sales or satisfy a specific textbook readership, they need to clearly establish their appeal early in the volume.  One method is for the contents page to outline the concerns and themes dealt with, and depending on the use of terminology this can also suggest those who may benefit most from the full text: are the chapters titled in such a way as to invite or exclude specific readerships?  In Graham Thompson’s book, the chapter titles arguably do him a major disservice, for his incisive narrative is far more accessible and focused than they may suggest.  The book is undoubtedly intellectually rigorous, but Thompson’s authorial voice wears this lightly enough to present a work appealing to a broader readership than may be initially suggested.

Thompson takes as his starting point the paraphrasing of US president Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 remarks on what defines America: ‘the business of America is business.’  From here, he explores how this statement embodied “conflicting ideological values” (1): as a slogan, Coolidge’s remark could both justify the actions of American business and simultaneously critique these actions as undermining the true nature of ‘America’.  Thompson consistently uses the term ‘America’ in those concept quote marks to analyse the impact and negotiation of this often contentious concept as it is conveyed in American literature.  In doing so, he interrogates the formulation of American Studies as a discipline both explicitly in his introductory chapter, and implicitly across the two parts of the book via his thematic readings of specific texts. 

Whereas Part I, “White Male Literary Culture”, identifies the struggles over the values shaping both American business and white male culture, in Part II, “The Difference of Gender, Race and Sexuality”, these struggles are reshaped and reclaimed by those who have been positioned on the outside.  This results in a narrative that ultimately explores the fundamental notions of identity underpinning the definition of ‘America’ as a nation.  In both parts, each chapter focuses on three or four examples of literary works or authors and, largely, this is effective, despite an inevitable assumption of prior knowledge on the part of the reader regarding the plots.  Thompson gets around this by grounding his own analyses within discussions of the works’ contexts and summaries of the existing critical commentaries.  For example, his study of Miller’s Death of a Salesman convincingly expands the established psychological and geographic reach and focus of the play from the domestic and the north-eastern seaboard sales region to the jungle. In this context, Willy Loman’s exhaustion arises when “the American pioneer spirit and the requirements of business in the jungle become incompatible” (33).  Thus the character of Uncle Ben becomes far more central in terms of the discourses of business than previous critical analyses have acknowledged. 

However, elsewhere Thompson can allow other critical voices far more domination, usually to the detriment of his own arguments.  Some works suffer particularly from this synoptic approach, especially those set in more recent decades or notional futures.  Nevertheless, whilst clearly comfortable throughout the book discussing his mid-20^th century examples, the ambiguity and challenges in Part II against the white male concept of ‘America’, and therefore of the discourses of business, also allow him greater freedom to express these analyses.  Overall, Thompson provides a valuable overview to this aspect of the cultural construction of ‘America’, albeit one that could leave some readers wanting more.