Matches inside:

He finds protagonists such as Rath nauseatingly pharisaic in the “spurious choice” they make between the “good” of morality and the “evil” of material success, and finds the plotline of their “precipitous flight from the bitch goddess of success” in city life to the pastoral settings of the country “where, presumably, [they] find real meaning in life” especially condescending and grating.84 The primary reason that Whyte finds novels such as Wilson’s “hypocritical” in their rejection of material success, and subsequent embrace of a more spiritual existence, is because the heroes of these works—in his case Tom Rath—do not actually retire to the country to live a life of Thoreau-like deprivation and poverty.