Still another novel by John Phillips Marquand, this time Point of No Return, a great big book (550 pages) that's too long by half. A blockbuster, I think, in its day -- 1947 -- but disappointing to re-read after fifty or so years. Just as in Marquand's earlier novels, the central figure, Charles Gray, feels himself bound down like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The many ropes are the social ties that connect him, not this time to Boston, but to a small Massachusetts seafaring town which Marquand calls Clyde but which is most likely modeled after the Newburyport of the author's own childhood. Charles is deeply in love with Jessica Lovell, who's a step above him in the social ladder (everything would have been just fine if he had been born one street over and had gone to Harvard instead of (gasp!) Dartmouth), but the marriage is blocked by Jessica's scheming dad, and Charles escapes to New York, where he marries a sensible, no-nonsense kind of gal with whom he subsists in something that more resembles a partnership than a romance. He finds work with the Stuyvesant Bank, and the plot revolves around two suspenseful topics: a) will Charles be promoted to vice-president of the bank, and b) (more important to me) what will be the outcome when Charles returns to Clyde and meets Jessica after a twenty-year absence. I read this very long novel waiting for the climactic interview between the long-separated lovers, and I felt cheated when Marquand dodged what I felt ought to have been the novel's resolution. It would have been an opportunity for fine writing and a proper resolution to the novel. Instead, I was forced to settle for an anti-climax: Charles makes V.-P. Nor is his promotion reported ironically, as it might or should have been-- Charles gets his promotion, but then comes to realize that he's jumped through hoops all his life and that the Stuyvesant Bank is just another piece of equipment. No, no. Nothing but rhetorical drums and trumpets for his achievement. Worse yet, the long anticipated meeting with Jessica never comes to pass. Marquand evades the issue. Charles returns to Clyde, meets various friends and relatives (including his doppelganger Jackie Mason -- not the cornball pseudo-Semitic comedian, but the accountant from Clyde) -- who's recently become engaged to Jessica, and then hightails it back to the big city, leaving in his wake at least one very frustrated reader.
What to make of a novelist who has made a career of satirizing the stuffy, constricted business world and who then gives us a novel in which we're expected to rejoice because someone makes vice-president! There's always been a certain glamor to the lonely entrepreneur, the Thomas Edison figure, puttering in his garage and coming up with a Big Idea, struggling to find support among the banker-skeptics, and then, against all odds, becoming rich and successful, providing employment for untold thousands, leading Americans to a new world of progress, etc. etc. But what in the world can be glamorous about climbing the corporate ladder (an action, which, as Samuel Johnson said, is performed in the same posture as creeping)?
Charles is the conformist, not one who rebels inwardly against conformity, but one who embraces it and turns conformity into achievement. It's no wonder that the Fifties were so oppressive. While in The Late George Apley, Marquand punctured social constriction, in this novel he's come around to the dark side.
Not only that -- the linguistic surface of the novel is bland. There's no style -- just serviceable gray prose.There are a number of good moments: a little flirtation -- just winks and nods -- carried on between Charles and a bored daughter-in-law while Charles discourses on stocks and bonds that's insightfully written and suggests that there might be a bit of distance between our hero and his chosen profession. But it's a loose end that goes nowhere.
Is this the end of my Marquand project, or do I have the initiative to tackle yet another big novel? Stay tuned.
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