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Point of No Return

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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.

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.)

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.

How come nobody remembers J.P. Marquand anymore ? At his best, he produced some of 20th century America's great fiction. POINT OF NO RETURN is perhaps his greatest novel and surely one of the "great American novels", up there with "An American Tragedy" by Dreiser, Warren's "All the King's Men", and Norris' "McTeague" Lewis' "Dodsworth", and several by Faulkner. It is quieter, it takes its time, and there are no dreadful family secrets, no violence, sex, or perversions of any kind. In short, it is a novel of another era, but a great novel nonetheless.

It seems to me that two opposing tendencies have always occupied American culture. One is quite puritanical, centered more in New England and Philadelphia, concerned with moderation, education, hard work, and success to those who deserve it. The Old North Church in Boston, where our nation can be said to have begun, typifies this tendency. In what other nation is the historical heart so simple and plain ? The other tendency, found in many places, but epitomized today in Las Vegas, is about luck, flash and display, raw opportunism and the devil-take-the-hindmost.

In POINT OF NO RETURN, Marquand takes an officer in a genteel Manhattan bank who hopes to be promoted to vice-president. He has a rival, somebody a bit more flashy, more willing to utter subtle put-downs behind his back. The officer, Charles Gray, hails from Newburyport, Mass., but has married and made his career elsewhere. He is sent back to his old hometown suddenly on bank business. The majority of the book is devoted to his memories of how he grew up in this small New England city on a river by the sea. Marquand contrasts the sober, hard-working, reliable Charles with his father, a likeable neer-do-well who gambled everything he could get his hands on in the stock market. The family is shown in the context of a conservative small town where "everything is in its place and there's a place for everything." The painstaking detail, the nuances of small town New England life, the nature, the passing of the seasons, the varieties of people found in such an environment are what make this such a great novel. If Charles Gray is not such a vivid character as those found on the pages of Balzac, Zola, or Faulkner, that may be the point. Charles romances the daughter of an `old money' family, but it is not to be. Class and tradition, as well as the vagaries of history and his own father's insouciance block him. He leaves his Boston job and goes to work in New York, where he meets his wife. When he returns to New York from his short trip to the past, he despairs. His rival will surely triumph. Charles and his wife are invited to the bank president's mansion by the sea. The ending is perfect. That is, it perfectly reflects Marquand's view that America became great because of its ability to produce people like Charles Gray--steady, reliable, intelligent, and willing to be a team player.

Marquand no doubt admired such people, perhaps a little too much. One of the strong characters in POINT OF NO RETURN is an anthropologist, Malcolm Bryant, who comes to do a social survey of Newburyport (called "Clyde" in the novel). Marquand paints him as a grotesque, unpleasant man with no social skills who treats the townspeople like insects. Bryant is based on the character of F. Lloyd Warner, an anthropologist who indeed carried out a social study of Newburyport in the 1920s. Throughout, Marquand displays an almost Antipodean dislike of intellectuals and academics, yet his own work is close to modern anthropology. That is probably why I like it so much. He has described the roots and origins of a solid class of businessmen; how they avoided the temptations of speculation and opportunism on one hand, and prevailed over the too-tight restrictions of class on the other. He shows how certain New England values and styles permeated east coast institutions in the first half of the 20th century. Though business is hardly the only occupation of a large country, America owes a lot to those generations who produced great numbers of people willing to labor for years to build solid industries and financial institutions. POINT OF NO RETURN is a slow, lyrical study of a life and career which may illustrate the whole society of the time. I consider it a classic. When I look around now and see Enron, sub-prime mortgage disasters, and 24 year-old arms dealers with government contracts worth hundreds of millions for defective ammunition, I despair. I fear the country has gone to the dogs. Where are our Charles Grays ? Woof woof.

Although not a short or easy work, Point of No Return is a novel worth one's time. On one level it is a genial satire of the New York banking scene in 1946 as World War II veteran Charlie Gray sweats out the coming shakeout in his genteel, white-shoe bank: who will get the promotion to vice president, him or his flashier rival Roger? Marquand's eye for detail is very acute, whether it's the layout of a desk blotter or a psychological nuance like whether to first-name a superior.

On another level Point of No Return is a midlife crisis, as Charlie has to return to the town of his childhood on a business trip and confront some demons from his young manhood, specifically the young lady from a wealthy family he was engaged to and almost married. Charlie is haunted by the anthropologist/sociologist who wrote a book called "Yankee Persepolis" about his little town and included his family in it, revealing his town to be as stratified and classbound in its way as any South Sea Island.

So, past a certain point, does anyone have any choice on how far s/he can go in life? And has Charlie reached that "point of no return" by his forties? These are the issues that torment him. In Marquand's telling, Charlie is a very sympathetic character, and the patient reader will find this an engrossing tale. This is my first Marquand novel but it won't be my last.

Marquand tells the story of Charles Gray, a successful middle-class, investment counselor who is approaching a midlife crisis of sorts. On the verge of receiving a promotion, his job forces him to go to Clyde, Massachusetts to do research into a cordage company.

Clyde is Charlie's hometown, where he had left a lot of emotionally baggage behind when he left it to find better prospects. The story unveils Charlie's life as it unfolded in Clyde - from his father's idiosyncrasies, his father's death, the Depression, and the events that led to his being unable to marry the woman he loved because he wasn't in their social class.

As Charlie recalls these times, he wonders if the hush and rush of getting ahead in the money world is really worth the benefit. Charles is a likeable character. While Marquand can be wordy, the writing is exceptionally solid and enthralling. The book deals with Charlie's dealing with the choices he made in life and what it has attained him. He also learns that the happier one becomes, the less freedom one has. Overall, this book is quite deep and I found myself very much interested in Charlie despite a slower-than-usual pace.

I have read this book perhaps a half dozen times and enjoyed it thoroughly each time. I think what captures me the most is Charlie's incredible discipline, intelligence, and ability to always do the right thing in all situations. I love the insiders view of the stock market rise and fall of the late twenties. I love the scene of small town New England, and I love the inside workings and politics of banking. Charlie's father, John Gray, is a totally captivating character, as well - a personality type that most of us have known at one time or another- brilliant and tragic, a classic "wish-fulfillment" person who doesn't know when to stop his wild fling with the stock market. Charlie's development as a person is in definite response to his father's personality type, in fact, Charlie's development is in reponse to all things about his environment. I know others have termed this book "tedious at times", but I find nothing tedious about it. The character studies are worth their weight in gold. As I've said, I've read this book a half dozen times, and I'll probably read it a half dozen more in my lifetime.

Although he is no Hemingway, in Point of No Return John P. Marquand lends ample support to the claim that he deserves far more recognition--and readers--than he currently enjoys. Indeed, along with other Marquand titles like The Late George Apley, Wickford Point, and H. M. Pulham, Esquire one could argue that he authored at least four of the top 100 or so best novels by an American in the 20th Century.

Perhaps what most distinguishes Point of No Return from the "Boston" novels for which Marquand is better known is that even after fifty years since publication the story has a remarkably contempory feel to it. In its main character, Charles Gray, the reader meets the kind of "organization man" that still populates middle management in corporate America. Essentially, oragnization men are those individuals (today, of course, including women) who subdue their native intelligence, integrity, and private desires in order to conform to an image that controls not only thier professional but personal lives as well. Indeed, the twarted rebellion and frustrated romance of Charles Gray, should have a remarkable resonance even to Baby Boomers, who now like the character are firmly into to middle age, mid-career, and deeply ambivalent about whether their superficial affluence has been worth the price.

"Point of No Return" JOHN P. MARQUAND: AUTHOR 1893-1960 This fellow is almost forgotten. His satires of WASP life in the mid-century were read by millions. "The Late George Apley" won a Pultizer when a Pultzer was actually given for excellence, not political affiliation. Charles Gray is a solid middle-aged banker with a mortgage, wife and two kids. He could use a raise and there's competition from a smooth-talking Harvard man. "The rich aren't like you and me," said Fitzgerald. Marquand seconds that idea and then he shows how utterly trapped in social convention the various social strata are. Run to the bookstore and read this American treasure. I'll say no more.

I read this book in junior high school (1965). I know now that I did not appreciate then the different levels of middle class Caucasian angst that I do today as an aging baby boomer. While Charlie Gray has a charmed life and his mid-life career crisis

might leave most readers wishing that they could take his place

and have his troubles, Marquand has created a story, richly illustrated with his detailed descriptions, that reflects the superficiality of white middle-class post-war America. Whether Marquand realized at the time the picture he was creating was one of glossing over the real problems of the era, poverty, racism, education, world militarism and so forth, the emptiness that envelopes and defines Charlie Gray is still present today in the "success" benchmarks the media portray. As a WASP-ish, aging, balding 54-year-old man who thought that he was going to accomplish something important 25-years ago and now wonders

what happened and why, I can identify with Charlie Gray. Unlike Mr. Gray, whether I get a promotion or not, it will not be a life-defining moment. I believe Marquand drew a picture of a contemporary businessman, searching for the optimism of his youth, tempered by his past, his limitations and his cynicism. Charlie Gray is a good man with good intentions, but

one who survives by getting along and trying to fit in. While he is kind, he is also selfish and introspective. He wishes for his fantasy job and his fantasy girl when he has almost everything any middle-class white male could have reasonably

expected to achieve in 1949. Charlie Gray would likely not be

happy unless he were hung by a brand new rope.