Martin Halliwell's own contribution to Twentieth Century American Culture, the series of “decade studies” that he edits for Edinburgh University Press, provides a combination of overviews of the principal fields of artistic production and case studies of eighteen sites of specific interest. Chapters on “Fiction and Poetry,” “Drama and Performance,” “Music and Radio,” “Film and Television” and “The Visual Arts beyond Modernism” are interspersed with readings of “texts” ranging from Disneyland to “Howl” and The Crucible to I Love Lucy. The overall design presents a picture of the 1950s as a considerably more colourful decade than the clichéd representations of men in grey flannel suits would have us believe. While such revisionism is not quite as new as Halliwell claims, American Culture in the 1950s does a decent job of covering the plethora of forms that help to characterize the era and illustrates the extent of the often complex crossovers between “mainstream” and “marginal” texts.

Despite its thoroughness, however, I came away from this volume with a profound sense of disappointment. Anyone with knowledge of Halliwell's previous books will know that for someone with such expertise in modernist literature, he has a strangely cloth-eared aptitude for prose. While at times this is merely an irritation – such as with mid-sentence switches in tense, multiple repetitions of the word “decade” within the space of a few lines, the mis-citation of the titles of Matthiessen's American Renaissance and Mailer's An American Dream, or the use of clumsy split infinitives – on other occasions it can make meaning hard to follow, or result in misleading passages. We are told, for example that “31 per cent of children were under fourteen in 1960 compared to 24 per cent in 1945,” that the explosion of the H-bomb in 1952 generated “nine times more heat than the sun” (both 5) and, with a woeful lack of historical logic, that Moloch “was the Hebrew god of commercialism” (74). We can probably surmise what Halliwell intends here – or when he notes that Einstein “discovers [sic] the general theory of gravitation” (xii) – but it would be better if he could tell it straight.

That the above should not be taken as mere nitpicking can be seen from another example: in a discussion of Eugene O'Neill, we are informed that A Long Day's Journey Into Night “was not performed (against his wishes) on Broadway until November 1956, three years after his death” (88). I suspect that most readers would take this to mean that O'Neill had wanted the play performed, whereas the truth is that he had requested it should not be performed until twenty-five years after his death.

Other problems arise as a result of an apparently sketchy knowledge of American history. In part, these could be the consequence of an understandable desire to privilege the 1950s by downplaying precursors. It is certainly revisionary to claim that the anti-hero, “marked by restlessness and a rootless identity” “emerges” in 1950s American literature (60) and would probably come as a surprise to Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville and many others. Likewise, the assertions that “popular/commercial music was so new” after World War II (122), or that Muddy Waters moved north at the same time as Louis Armstrong in 1922 (Waters moved in 1943) are simply wrong.

Halliwell's readings of visual culture tend to be more persuasive than those of his chosen literary texts but, while many of the latter could be challenged on a subjective level, some blatant errors do need highlighting. He seems to believe that the Beat “muse” and Times Square hustler Herbert Huncke was called “Herman” and the reading of On the Road (79–80) contains a litany of errors too long to list from the moment that we are told Sal makes his first transcontinental road trip with Dean. There is also a tendency to gloss over the subtler nuances of 1950s life: Halliwell argues that the construction of the Lincoln Center was “seen as” (by whom?) a symbol of an “upwardly vibrant nation” and that this helped to “regenerate a slum area” (32), forgetting how this construction trampled on the wishes of the local community and helped in the removal of the working classes from valuable real estate in Lower Manhattan. Likewise, the suggestion that – unlike writers and directors – painters “could be castigated only by publicly making subversive statements or declaring allegiance to radical groups” (194) ignores the efforts of the likes of Michigan congressman George A. Dondero, who claimed that cubism and abstract expressionism were anti-American in their desire to “destroy by designed disorder.”

To conclude, I offer some brief examples of a further problematic tendency in this disappointing book. On innumerable occasions, Halliwell is content to take the easy option, rather than unravel the complexities of historical narrative. We are told, for instance, that “with the lure of advertising it was difficult for many to resist the pleasures of consumption” (15). For the millions of Americans who had been children during the Depression and who had come of age during the war, the obvious response to this – though one not suggested here – would surely be, “Why would we want to resist?” In adopting this puritanical warning against succumbing to “pleasures,” Halliwell situates his argument in an American tradition running through Veblen and Paul Goodman, yet it is hard to see ways in which artistic attacks on dominant culture (in a time long before fears of global warming) could ever reach out to the mainstream unless – as with much 1960s counterculture – they incorporated material abundance within their own ethos. A similar problem surfaces in Halliwell's coverage of the rise of rock ’n’ roll, in which he ignores the role of (white) country and swing in the music's origins and conflates “conservative” and “middle class” in its reception. As so often in American cultural history, it is the gap between these two – in particular, as here, on a generational level – that can effect cultural change.

Graham Thompson introduces his book with an indication of some reservation about its concept. In the opening paragraph he suggests that “the tendency to make decade-length periods in American cultural history cohere under catchy epithets now seems clumsy and inadequate” (1). While this sounds like a strangely defensive tone to adopt in a book belonging to Edinburgh University Press's decade-by-decade Twentieth Century American Culture series, it is at once both a sensible comment and an indicator of the author's own doubts about the validity of his project, which recur throughout the remainder of the book. While the old joke that “the Sixties” ended at Altamont (after all, it was December 1969), suggests that cultural memories of particular eras do occasionally correspond to chronological end-points, “history” tends to be more messy. That said, there are moments when Thompson could have made more of an effort to fit his remit: for example, chapter 5, “American Culture and Globalization,” does not seem very 1980s-specific at all, ranging from Emerson and Melville and the US–Mexican War, through World War II and many other events in what becomes a lucid overview of America and globalization across a century and a half. This is all well put and interesting enough in itself, but surely this was the moment to discuss the fall of the Berlin Wall (mentioned in passing) and – given the obvious interest in intellectual history – Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay “The End of History?”, which is overlooked entirely despite its enormous influence both at the time and subsequently.

This is not to suggest that this is a bad book – far from it. Indeed, many of the individual chapters construct clear and often challenging readings of developments in the arts during the decade. These central chapters – on fiction and poetry, art and photography, film and television, and music and performance – provide the real substance of the book and are the ones likely to prove of most interest to students. While it would be possible to quibble about the omission of detailed treatment of by then long-established authors such as Bellow and Roth and to point out that the postmodern “return to history” in fiction was well under way with Pynchon and Doctorow long before the 1980s, the readings of the writers emerging during the 1980s are persuasive. Despite a couple of howlers – John Updike would probably have been surprised to be listed with Bellow and Mailer as a Jewish writer – the chapter on fiction and poetry is generally astute and well structured, although the fact that poetry only receives a page and a half is indicative of where Thompson's interests lie. Likewise, chapter 3, “Film and Television,” combines effective treatment of how changing technologies (especially the VCR) contributed to the revision of the content of films and television shows with the study of genre, although my own feeling is that the very interesting suggestions about how postmodern experimentation started to become mainstream during the decade could have been illustrated more effectively: the popular, multi-Emmy winning Moonlighting (1985–89) is overlooked, despite the degree to which it matches what Thompson intimates.

Ultimately, this reads like a book in which the author is striving to break free from the constraints imposed by a series whose remit seems flawed. There is no doubt that Thompson is an imaginative thinker, willing to challenge critical orthodoxies and impose bold new marks on what had seemed well-trodden ground. His book, however, indicates an indecisiveness at the heart of the project, with Thompson unable to decide whether to push his remit to (and beyond) its limits in order to discuss what really interests him, or to try to squeeze into a garment that does not fit and which is ill-suited to his range of ideas.