POINT OF NO RETURN

by John P. Marquand ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 1948

I like this better than anything Marquand has done for some time, yes, better than So Little Time in many ways. In mood and tempo it is closest to H.M. Pulham, Esq.,- again one of those books that might be characterized as a slow motion picture of your neighbor's life. Actually, one has a feeling of nothing much happening, and yet -- both in the present day frame in which the story is set, and the flashback to life in a caste-ridden North Shore Boston suburb, complete to minute details -- one feels intimately a part of the round of events. The Grays are just such people as we all know. They lived on a side street- a good side street; they were well-connected; they ""knew everyone""; but they didn't quite belong to the top drawer, socially. Then Charlie falls in love with a Brahmin's only daughter. It works out, for a time, lamely, painfully- then the engagement is broken when Charlie's father dies (suspectedly by his own hand) at the time of the stock market crash, when the dream he had lived for evaporates.... The story is bracketed by a few tense hours, today. Charlie is uncertain- haggardly so- over his fate at the bank on Fifth Avenue; his wife, in a Connecticut suburb, is pushing him to take action- he hesitates, before the mores of the Bank. And, during this period, he is sent to his boyhood home in Massachusetts on an investigation -- and the reader is given a panoramic picture of those days of his past, and then- with him- learns the end of that story....Pleasant reading, nostalgic at times; not perhaps as challenging to one's ideas as So Little Time -- but ""good theatre"".

Pub Date: March 7, 1948

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1948

Categories: FICTION