Customer Reviews

The Late George Apley

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John P. Marquand probably was one of the most successful authors of his day and this book, for which he won a Pulitzer prize was the start of his brilliant career. Unfortunately, with Marquand's death in 1960, he fell from favor with the academy who was itself enamoured with tales of life in a university and stories addressing issues of gender and sex. Marquand's stories about middle aged WASPs in Boston coping with trying to come to grips with their lives were no longer in fashion and sadly have not returned to the center place that they previously occupied.

This is a novel about manners and invokes the particular time and place of the WASP ascendency in America, just before the second World War. Marquand's hero is a representative of what used to be known as a "Boston Brahmin." Marquand handles Apley with a mixture of bemusement and foundness. He has clearly met George Apley's in his life and knows the type well. What would have been in less capable hands a mere characture, becomes a full portrait of what was at the time, a dying breed. Marquand sensed this and this provides the point of departure for the book.

"The Late George Apley is a bit of a pastische of privately printed books designed to memorialize a dearly departed loved one. This allows Marquand to use his frequently used flashback technique to describe the particulars of Apley's life. At times this provides Marquand with the opportunity to indulge in both high comedy and low drama, as is the case when Apley falls in love with a girl who is both Irish and Catholic. Although this enables some satire on the subject of the way Boston's elite viewed the Irish, it is also a source of regret that Apley, like so many characters in Marquand's books, did not make a different choice in life. Sentiments that as Jonathan Yardley has observed "are not just limited to the denizens of Backbay or Harvard Square."

This novel by Marquand won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In this book, a writer named Willing, an old friend of George Apley, is requested by Apley's son John to collect all of the late Apley's correspondence and use them to form a biography. Although Willing is using them to eulogize Apley and to describe the life of upper-class Bostonians, the reader feels pity at the waste of a life and how a man's class and upbringing can quelch his own desires and thoughts. The book is an excellent example of the use of understatement. However, I am shocked to discover that this fairly well known Pulitzer Prize winner is out-of-print. Surely this is the publisher's fault.

J.P. Marquand was well known in his day, both as a serious writer(The Late George Apley won a Pulitzer Prize) and for the Mr. Moto detective series (made into movies starring Peter Lorre as the title character). This novel makes skillful use of the device of the unreliable narrator; it is told from the point of view of a writer putting together a life of Apley who, like his subject, is thoroughly conventional, and thus does not realize that his portrait of Apley reveals the sterility of the latter's life. The novel is also a skillful depiction of a particular class in a particular place and time. I agree with the other reviewers that it is a shame that it is out of print.

--one of my favorite fictional characters. Everything you have read about Proper Bostonians is true. George was born with a silver spoon and three strikes against him. He wasn't to grow; he was to be molded. He wasn't to feel; he was to behave. He wasn't to love; he was to honor. That he somehow managed to do all of these things makes him a shining hero.

Marquand uses a brilliant narrative device using two voices: the ever-so-proper Bostonian diarist and George's black sheep son. The two frequently write each other disputing the type of memoir to be written about George. You grow very fond of both these completely different narrators.

This is one of my all-time-favorite novels. Reading it once is not enough

This book masterfully tells the tale of one George Aply. A man born into a world of seeming wealth and power but in reality a little cog in a system he cannot control or stop. Throughout his life George makes attempts to go beyond the limts placed on him but he never has quite enough 'guts' to complete the breakout.

Hold a mirror up to a mirror. Looking into that reflection of a mirror reflected into itself--conformity into conformity--one sees only how time varies, since the same is being reflected into the same. So is Marquand's novel: a saga of one family's past and future, reflected by and through the protagonist, George Apley.

Whether Marquand intended a pun on this family's name or not, it is an apt, fictional name for a family of Boston. Planted in Boston's fertile cultural soil, this Brahmin family weathers the passage of different ages in American History. Seen through George's eyes, the events shape the people only as much as the people let themselves be shaped, and these Bostonians seriously intend on shaping their lives.

This novel has a more formal, stilted language throughout, but it works here; it is necessary. Read this book to discover an age, to explore characterization, to ride down theCharles River of time. It has a subtle, genteel power: finesse and civility predominate. How refeshing in this age of stark, graphic literalness!

THE LATE GEORGE APLEY is not an action novel. Not much happens. It's the fictional biography of an upper class, proper, Bostonian man who lived in the late 1800's & early 1900's, as supposedly written by a friend after Apley's death at the urging of Apley's son, who has provided letters and other documents on which the story is purportedly based. The turning point in Apley's life occurs when, as a young man, he falls in love with a girl "not of the proper set", and is somehow (the text is vague here)forced by his family to relinquish her. Much of the rest of the book is some version of, "What if...", and "Where does one's obligation to oneself end and one's obligation to others begin?" I found this really interesting, because the same question is very relevant today. Today we marry whomever we choose, have children whenever we want (in or out of marriage), divorce whenever it seems called for, say whatever we feel like saying. Are we happier? That's the question Apley asks. It's a really good question.

That "The Late George Apley" is so little read is amazing and saddening for it indicts publishers, book sellers and readers. This is a great book that is far too well written to be appreciated by modern readers who seem satisfied by books that feature explicit sex, or violence or whatever but not by great writing and intelligent characterization. The commercial side of the book business is, apparently, interested only in making as much money as possible and so produces mostly trash designed to lure the innocent readers of the 21st century. A striking example of this can be found in the books available on the Kindle list where there are virtually no classics or books worth reading.
To get back to my review of "The Late George Apley", I will start by saying that it is a very careful and thoughtful study of a man who was a victim of his heritage. As the son of a Boston Brahmin, his future is settled by his parents' manipulation of how he saw the world. While this is a very different rearing than most of us alive in 2009 have had, it was described in delightful detail by Mr. Marquand. That George Apley was unprepaired to deal with his times provides the real humor that Marquand brought to the story and also broadcasts a message to parents about the dangers of falling too far behind the times. With this book John P Marquand won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The award was richly deserved, and that so few have read it supports my contentions about the failings of all aspects of modern literature.

For those who know of the Mr. Moto movies in the thirties, it is no surprise to discover the writer J. P. Marquand's more noteworthy Pulitzer Prize effort, "The Late George Apley." John P. Marquand came originally from the stable of Max Perkins, the distinguished Scribner genius editor. His first several novels were disappointments, so he left Scribner's for another publisher, carrying with him the idea of writing about a self-made American with the credentials and pedigree of generational wealth suggested to him by the prescient Perkins. Some great writers do not succeed initially Perkins had opined. He was right about Marquand when "The Late George Apley" was published in 1940 and grabbed the Pulitzer Prize.
If you think here you will be reading an expanded "Gatsby" alone you will be slightly disappointed.Or if you think the WASP figure will be lampooned and savaged hilariously line by line like Sinclair Lewis, you again will be mistaken. This is a rewardingly imagined work of fiction that is dead-on in depicting the endangered WASP specimen from Boston in the form of George Apley.Marquand argues that he is presenting the novel story as a memoir as if he needs distance from the scene of the crime of the super-rich WASP spilling it all. It is far more subtle than that, not holding a mirror or a mcroscope for close study but creating a living flawed character unmasking himself as he proceeds to gather latent self-awareness---too absorbed with the domestic intrigues inside his Getty-like family (the Apleys)You get attached to George, as he suspects gradually the world passing him by with "rosebud" sentiments; or when he lists numerous bequests though longing for the simpler things that were not his concern. Marquand(as many-deviced as Odysseus)depicts George as a product of the times or "conventions" while he adjusts his blinders to change. The more "broad-minded" he proclaims to be, he is caged; the more "freedom" he proclaims he has bought, he is trapped. Yet, you almost mourn his final departure. Really, do our words match our deeds within our family?Reading along, a sympathy builds for the hypocritical George because he is so human while dumb to his deception. There is plenty to say here about the techniques of stripping just enough fiddle-faddle pomposity from the Apleys to leave them in dignity, and this Marquand does admirably well.The way he imaginatively employs excerpts of correspondences from colleagues like "Mike" or "Walker" throughout enlarges the parody continuously.And Marquand inserts himself into the parody too, I suspect, when he has George mouth his dislike for "the poet, the minister, your essayist" as not being men of affairs, unlike the heights of "banking and business." Of course, when George says these things, you have already learned how accidental George's success was, considering he was a middling student, grades achieved on the wisdom of "Distrust the book which reads too easily because such writing appeals more to the senses than the intellect.Hard reading exercises the mind."It is simply a delightful read that slips in and out of high comedy, where you actually envision an addle-brained Alice Brady-like character from "My Man Godfrey" reciting the imagined conversations within.
At one point, George says, "There's nothing more ill-bred than the over-lavish spending of money," shortly advising his wife to collect Oriental vases, something he knows little of.Another time George says, "Find a Bostonian and you will find a citizen of the world." This from a "broad-minded" George who never ventures beyond Boston. And when he does go to Rome near the end, George makes sure he is invited to the right parties "for the right introductions." There he absurdly decrees: "Rome is really a delightful place, particularly when one brings one's own group with one." (true, ask Brad and Angelina)The most absurd utterance by George, "I have never in any way tried to influence my children," had the loudest effect after you have read of the many advantages (always referred to as "responsibilities")handed down to his children along the way, like municipal bonds and securities, etc.. Then again, he strikes a universal chord by trying to duplicate himself in his two children, hoping to the end that they have the same values and interests as he does.Isn't that what "helicopter moms/dads" do today?
Other reviewers are correct about this fun read that dishes the dirt on the super-rich with an insider appeal(intimate correspondence), entirely imagined by Marquand.Surely this Marquand classic offers a different take on family responsibility than the values presented in Mario Puzo's "The Godfather." Believe me, today there are still George Apleys about the American landscape with no memoirist in sight to prick the balloon with the same charming affection.
All in all, "..George Apley" did not lead to the extinction of the supre rich WASP.They are now in the suburbs across America today, still trying to guide, coax and control the destinies of their progeny away from the hands of "radicals" who want to remove such things as inheritance and stability.A capital read. A capital fellow, that Marquand.

I've never been a huge fan of biographies. So it was to my extreme dismay (!) that I discovered The Late George Apley, winner of the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was a fictionalized biography. Not to worry though, I ended up loving it!

The 'writer' (i.e. narrator) of this book is a man who was close friends with the late George Apley. When George dies, his children realize that they have never known him well, beyond the way they have known him as a father. They asked the writer to prepare a biography, which was based on his own knowledge of Mr. Apley as well as interviews with his friends and family, and correspondence to and from Mr. Apley.

The resulting story was actually pretty interesting. Apley grew up as the son of a powerful New England family who were very concerned with convention and maintaining their place in society. In his teens and throughout the first few years of his 20s, Apley rebelled against his family's desires for him. However, in the end, he married the woman he was supposed to, and not the one he loved.

As time went on, Apley had children of his own and attempted to raise them the same way he was raised, apparently forgetting that he'd realized the class system was bull. Only in his later years did he begin to question his actions, and inactions, and to remember that he'd once felt the rules of his class to be dull, pointless, and no way to live your life.

Of course, his children also rebelled against his archaic ways and thought him to be a bit silly. And of course, his own son eventually embraced his responsibilities to his family and gave up on his own dreams.

I enjoyed the use of letters and news clippings and found this story to be told in a fairly unique and compelling way. I would have liked to know something more about the narrator though. There were hints throughout that made me think there would be some great unveiling at the end and we'd discover that it was actually his worst enemy writing it, or something equally interesting. In the end though, all we know is that a close friend to his family narrated the story of George Apley.