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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
They do not write books like this anymore,
By
This review is from: Point of No Return (Hardcover)
There are few books published like this any more and I wonder why. One reason could be that people do not read like they once did and this is why serious fiction concerns itself with either life in the university (hardly the stomping ground for everyman figures) and alternately freaks and geeks. Since the death of John Cheever, there have been few books that address the trials and tribulations of the middle and upper middle class reader. One does not find sensational crimes or magic realism in works by John Marquand. While there certainly is a place for these sorts of things, it is a pity that Marquand's influence waned with his death in the 1960s.This book concerns themes that probably are more universal than what one finds in contemporary literature. A man is seeking to get a promotion in his firm and he is in competition with another person for it. During the novel we really get "the story of his life, using the "flashback technique" that Marquand made famous in all of his best books. Along the way there is regret and a curiosity about what he might lost by not pursuing a different path. Not exactly earth shattering events, but things that grownups experience everyday. One wonders if the reason that people do not read as they once did is due to television and other assorted distraction or for the simple reason that the books that are published are so very far removed from common experiences. Marquand's fall since the 1960s has been a sad one. He was at one time, one the best-selling authors in the US. It is a tragedy that more of his works are not in print, this one in particular. If ever an author desereved "The Library of America" treatment it is he.
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A minority report on a flawed novel,
By
This review is from: Point of No Return (Hardcover)
This novel has been called the shrewdest portrait of American life since Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920). That may be an overly ambitious claim, but the book has its points (it has also been called a painstakingly accurate social study of a New England town), and many will find it "a good old-fashioned read," a genteel, mildly absorbing family saga covering two generations. My main complaint is that it is simply too long: 559 pages, when it should have been about two-thirds that length. It is old-fashioned all right, in the sense that its pace is decidedly slow and deliberate; those who like their fiction fast-paced and dramatic need to look elsewhere. There is a sense here of all the time in the world, and the modest events of the story unfold in quite a leisurely fashion, with lengthy passages of description, exposition, explanation, reflection, retrospection. Marquand feels obliged to spell out much that a more modern writer would suggest, imply, leave his reader to infer, or simply omit. I sometimes felt I would never get to the end of it. Occasionally the book has an elegiac quality. The protagonist, earnest, conscientious, buttoned-down, and rather dull Charley Gray, is an upper middle-class banker in his forties, back from the war, resuming his place in an old, small, traditional New York City bank in 1947, living in what would now be called a yuppie suburban development with his wife and two children, and worrying about promotion in the bank. A large part of the novel, however, is devoted to his youth, family life, and first romance in the old, small, traditional New England town (Clyde, Mass.) where he grew up and where his family has its roots. Hence some of the novel has a postwar setting of 1947 New York City and suburbia, but most of it has a prewar setting and is a portrait of New England small-town life from World War I through the 1920s. Perhaps the most memorable character is Charley's father, a charming, irresponsible ne'er-do-well of good family and no accomplishment, who promises much and delivers little, and who loses any money he gets his hands on by his compulsive speculation in the stockmarket. Charley is determined not to be like his father. The business about the visiting, snooping academic anthropologist/sociologist who writes a study of Clyde and has a passion for categorizing and pigeonholing everything and everyone is heavy-handed and becomes tiresome, strained, and intrusive. (There is an odd slip in which Marquand has the misapprehension that a Duesenberg is "a foreign car"--a strange mistake for an American social historian of the 1920s and 1930s.) John P. Marquand (1893-1960) enjoyed that rare thing, both popular and critical success, for the last two decades of his life. He was widely read and admired as a distinguished American novelist. He has few readers today. This book has usually been regarded as one of his better efforts. He was a facile writer whose prose here is smooth and readable enough, but lacks crispness, incisiveness, pungency, wit. In the end, the whole performance is pleasant and agreeable but hardly gripping or searching or profound; it is, instead, prolix, rather bland, a little tired, and somewhat dated. And the big decisive scene, the moment of truth toward which the entire novel seems to be building is, when it finally arrives, "a strangely hollow climax," to use Marquand's words (and an all-too-predictable one as well). If you want to read Marquand at his best, before he began to take himself too seriously as a social historian, try The Late George Apley (Pulitzer Prize, 1938), Wickford Point (1939), and perhaps H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941). I believe all three are livelier and more engaging than this book. (The last of these has a protagonist who has much in common with Charley Gray and who has his own "point of no return" story to tell; indeed, H. M. Pulham, Esquire shares its major themes with Point of No Return.)
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ONE OF THE BEST,
By
This review is from: Point of No Return (Paperback)
I discovered "Point of No Return" as a teenager. It sat on a shelf in my father's library and sounded like an interesting title. It is now an old friend.I've reread this subtle novel many times over the years and find, remarkably, that with each reading I get a different sense of Marquand's ultimate message. In fact, the whole story seems to take on new meaning over time, a delightful characteristic of every great book. Marquand is a wonderful author. I am currently savoring his "So Little Time" and recommend all of his work. "Point of No Return," however, will always be my favorite.
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