Word: howe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...HAPPY FEW (345 pp.)-Helen Howe-Simon & Schuster...
...title refers, in irony, to a select circle of the prewar Harvard faculty, to which the heroine is hostess; the novel exhibits the breakdown of 1) the principle of selection, 2) the circle, and 3) the hostess. Miss Howe (sister of radio commentator Quincy Howe, daughter of Mark De Wolfe Howe) works a modest claim in territory on which J. P. Marquand had an option. Her ear is attentive, though incapable of his flights of parody; her knowledge of Boston, Cambridge and Harvard politics is sharp and sometimes subtle; her style is firm, though it would have been firmer...
...Novelist Howe's satire is not the final criticism of higher learning in the U.S., but it has its sting. Harvardmen will recognize the traits and the chatter. The Master of "Bromfield House," who enters on a card each new pun he divines in Finnegans Wake; the English department poet whose looks at least were once Keatsian; the Fogg Art Museum curator and his inseparable friends, young men of debonair malice; the publicity-seeking psychologist from the Midwest and his wife, resolutely unrepressed; and Dorothea's husband, John Calcott, a gentleman. Calcott, always well under control, stuns Dorothea...
...pressed for time, read the first half of the book and toss it away. Some place midway between the middle and the last third, Miss Howe begins to search for a soul for Dorothea. She finds it for her--you've guessed it--not in Cambridge, but Out West, among the peepul. Not until Dorothea joins the bedpan brigade in a Boston hospital and follows it up with a train trip (tourist class) to Idaho, does she discover Life...
...this is pretty hard to take. But if you want confirmation of your suspicion that certain local professors are made of clay from the kneecaps down, Miss Howe's treatment of the Harvard faculty and all the bright, glittering people who cluster round them like a beeswarm is just what you're after...