In the novel, the author was so involved in telling his story that he didn’t seem to notice that it was full of cliches — or, if he did, to care. It was seriously written pulp, not just turned out for the market but torn out of the writer, and his apparent belief that the garish was the significant gave it a crude fascination. It was the kind of attempted epic that good American writers have abandoned to the mass market — the literature of “What went wrong and how do we find our way back?’’ Kazan is a good, energetic storyteller, so it reads better than it sits on one afterward...

A writer works alone, not in the marketplace, but Kazan has internalized the popular market. He is a popular writer who made a popular success of his confessions about popular success. The novel The Arrangement was as commercial as hell, though it was written by a man who wasn’t under any pressure to write commercially and who maybe didn’t even know he was doing it. Kazan is as naturally commercial in his thinking as many good businessmen, and three million copies of the novel have been sold. He writes like an unlettered Mailer—tough-guy sex and gutsy-naive psychodrama. And in writing The Arrangement he didn t sell out; he probably wrote just what he felt — startling truths of a kind that made the book reviewer in Life say, “No matter who you are, it will cause a falter in the rhythm of your days and nights, perhaps a defoliation of your life style.”