Some Recommended Reading for “Mad Men” Fans

This coming Sunday marks the return of AMC’s Mad Men, and advance reviews and think-pieces are billowing across the Internet like so much cigarette smoke through a poorly-ventilated ad agency office. (Here’s our two cents on AMC’s design choice for its season seven poster, for what it’s worth.)

This weekend’s premiere is also the perfect occasion to return to a sharp piece from our archives, written by Seth Colter Walls for Issue 20. If you love Mad Men, argued Walls, you should really read Simone de Beauvoir’s novel Les Belles Images. Here’s an excerpt of Walls’s essay:

An ad-agency savant is known for composing inspired campaigns on the fly. After work hours, bouts of heavy drinking alternate with bedding extramarital partners who are left begging for more. Then this world-by-the-gonads member of the creative class heads home and puts the children to bed—before enjoying some banal but topical spousal conversation about a fast-changing, late-sixties milieu.

No, this isn’t a recap of a Mad Men episode, but a rough précis of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images, a 1966 novel about a professionally sure-footed yet spiritually unfulfilled ad-woman named Laurence. The novel’s sole English translation is out of print—perhaps because de Beauvoir’s existentialist attention to the empty form of betterment aligned with the late-sixties “good life” is far less market-friendly than the soft-focus anomie of the AMC franchise. Mad Men–branded suits—an “exclusive” creation of the show’s costume designer, Janie Bryant—will always look handsome enough in a Banana Republic display window, quite aside from the show’s content.

Laurence is no Peggy Olson, Walls writes, and she’s far more self-aware than Betty Draper. For all of the plot-based similarities between the two works, there are also some significant differences:

The contemporary viewer of Mad Men—who might be a bit smugly proud of understanding the subtle, sidelong glance the show can cast on the various ignorances and hidebound social forms of yesteryear—may well be taken aback by how quickly de Beauvoir picked up on such themes in real time.

Read the rest of Seth Colter Walls’s piece here.