Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Point of No Return

John P. Marquand, once among the most popular novelists in America, is now virtually unknown.  Reading Point of No Return, his novel of middle-to-upper class manners in a small New England town, it’s hard to see why.  The high-brow critics of his era never had any use for him but the public adored him.  He won a Pulitzer Prize and many of his books were Book of the Month Club selections.  Nearly all his novels published after 1937’s The Late George Apley were best-sellers.  And now he’s virtually unread.  Why?

I have a guess as to why, though I welcome other’s ideas.  There was once a time in America when there was a ruling middlebrow culture.  During the twenty year period after WWII, the exploding demographic of young suburban businessmen and their wives saw themselves as the future.  They’d fought in the war, they’d triumphed, and they regarded economic success and personal satisfaction as their reward.  They were almost exclusively white and middle-to-upper class and they were centered in the Northeastern part of the country.  The men went to work and the women stayed home and raised the children.  Unlike their parents, they had money left over after the bills were paid and this afforded them leisure time to explore cultural activities.  They played golf, they belonged to the country club and they summered at the shore.  They listened to the same songs, went to the same movies, and read the same books.  And what were these songs, movies, and books about?  Why, themselves, of course.  If there was ever a monolithic cultural consensus in America, it was perhaps reflected in this late-1940’s to early-1960’s generation. Call it the Mad Men culture.  Marquand might be the post-child of this middlebrow culture for no one reflected it, for better or worse, than he did, and everyone seemed to realize it at the time.  Perhaps he has fallen out of favor because his subjects, like John Cheever, are so identified with this particular cultural consensus, one that is long-gone and repudiated.  This is my guess as to why Marquand has virtually disappeared.  If his subjects were a reflection of the people and attitudes of a bygone era, what could he possibly have to say to us now?   

Well, the answer is, plenty.  I was a bit dismayed when I first picked up Point of No Return and found it was 550+ pages.  Who wants to read a novel of that length about the intricate class structure of pre-war WASP society?  I immediately formed a prejudice against it and assumed it would be better if it were shorter.  The thought occurred to me that maybe this was the root of Marquand’s problems with the critics, that perhaps he was nothing more than a over-blown dramatist who heaped detail upon detail, who explained every nuance, until there was nothing left to to the reader’s imagination.  But this is not the case, not even close.  Marquand is certainly no minimalist and his exploration of pre-war WASP society is detailed and meticulous but what makes it work is that it is so true to life.  There are no false notes here, nothing that seems even remotely out of place.  You always feel like you’re reading something by someone who fully understands his characters and the situations he places them in.  The book’s length turns out to be one of its strengths because the story is told at a leisurely pace which allows the reader to clearly understand the everyday rhythms of life in Clyde, Massachusetts (a stand-in for Marquand’s hometown of Newburyport, MA.)  Another of the book’s strengths is Marquand’s steady and competent prose. He has little of the charm or style a greater writer might bring to their work but, again, this is a good thing.  A more stylistic account would take away from the verisimilitude Marquand achieves. 

The story is about the life of Charles Gray, circa 1947, who is married with two children and works as an investment banker at the Stuyvesant Bank in New York City.  Charles is being considered for a vice-presidency at the bank, a position he and his wife Nancy want very much.  One day he awakes and finds his thoughts on his boyhood home of Clyde, Massachusetts, a place he hasn’t seen in nearly two decades and one he thinks about rarely.  By what perhaps is a coincidence he is asked to go back to Clyde to do some research on a business the bank is thinking of investing in.  At this point Marquand begins to tell the story of Charles’ time in Clyde through a series of flashbacks in which we trace his boyhood through adolescence and early manhood.  One of the main plots in the book has to do with Charles’ father John, a charming, likeable, rogue of a man who has little care for convention, a liability in a town as class-oriented as Clyde.  Marquand contrasts the steady and reliable Charles with his charming but reckless father.  We see early on that Charles is the antithesis of his father, purposefully.  Charles understands early in life that John Gray, for all his good-natured likeability, is a careless and foolhardy man, a man who will inevitably hurt those who love him most.  I am not saying I identify with Charles but one of Marquand’s skills is to show us glimpses of ourselves in his characters.  While arguing with his father about his reckless investments, which threaten the entire family, John insists to Charles that he’ll be careful, which Charles knows from experience is a lie: 

When it came to money, everyone always promised to be careful.  In fact, it often seemed to Charles that most of his subsequent life had been spent in a series of timid, hedging precautions, in balancing probable gains and losses in order to keep sums of money intact.  The probity, the reliability and the sobriety that such a task demanded were to make his own life dull and careful.  Except for a few brief moments, he was to face no danger or uncalculated risk.  He was to measure his merriment and hedge on his tragedies.  He was to water down elation and mitigate disaster, and to be at the right place at the right time, and to say the right thing with the right emphasis.  Yet, whenever he thought of himself as a dull, deluded opportunist, compared with other people, he always remembered the intensity of his own feelings when his father had been speaking.  There had been a hideous sense of impending disaster, and no possible way to stop it.   

Who among us has not had such thoughts about themselves?  I certainly have about my own self, along with the same self-justifying rationalization that Charles has.  Point of No Return is full of such glimpses into the human condition.  We get it (spoiler alerts!!) when Charles, deeply in love with a young lady who, according to Clyde’s intricate class distinctions, is out of his league, convinces himself that everything will turn out fine.  His love blinds him to the fact that it could never turn out fine and the reader sees this long before Charles does.  The girl is too weak, too much a part of Clyde, to ever go against her father’s wishes.  When she finally breaks it off with Charles and lies crumpled at her father’s feet in front of him, the father and daughter are so pathetic we breathe a sigh of relief for Charles – he can get away clean from this situation. From that point it was clear (at least it was to me) that Charles’ personal relationship worked out for the best.  Nancy, who would become his wife, is a much more admirable character than the weak, tradition-bound Jessica.  Nancy has the traits – good-nature, a sense of humor, compassion and understanding, no illusions, no nonsense - most of us would want in a wife.  For those of us long married, we get another glimpse into ourselves in the relationship between Charles and Nancy, in particular the easy comfort which comes from knowing someone so well so long, when you know each other’s thoughts so well that words are often not necessary for communication.  We also get a glimpse of reality in the book’s final pages when Charles, having gotten the vice-presidency he so desperately wanted, finds no joy or satisfaction in it.  His climb up the corporate ladder will afford him and his family a bigger house in a better neighborhood, perhaps membership in a more upscale country club, perhaps a new sailboat, but that is all.  It will not buy happiness, which will still be elusive. His doubts and discontents will still remain.  Charles Gray is one of the most fully-realized characters I’ve even encountered in a novel because Marquand has made him fully human.  He’s everyman, which is another way of saying he’s you and me.

Read Marquand if you love a story in which you get such glimpses into yourself.  When my wife noticed how wrapped up I was in the book she asked me what it was about.  Not wanting to stop reading to explain the whole plot, I shrugged and simply said, “It’s about life.”  

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