Word: marmot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...disappointments of the year was John Hersey's The Marmot Drive, the story of a Connecticut woodchuck hunt, full of murky meanings and pseudo-archaic Yankee lingo. One of the real surprises of the year was the belated bow in fiction of aged (81) Philosopher Bertrand Russell. His Satan in the Suburbs consisted of five stories whose weird plots and good-natured skepticism made for pretty good...
Since all the characters, including Hester, are extremely reticent about explaining themselves, there rises around The Marmot Drive an atmosphere of smoky symbolism. Though the book is smoothly written, its characters never quite develop enough force to blow the smoke away...
...MARMOT DRIVE (273 pp.)-John Mersey-Knopf...
...best and worst in people have been ships, planes, hotels, tropic outposts, small combat units, African safaris. It remained for Novelist John (A Bell for Adano, The Wall) Hersey to put his characters to the test in a modern-day woodchuck roundup. None of the people in The Marmot Drive like each other very much to begin with. When Hester comes up from New York for a weekend at the out-of-the-way small town of Tunxis, Conn., it is to meet the family of Eben, a moody young fellow she has taken up with in the big city...
Matthew ignores her advances, but in their absence the marmot drive has begun to go badly. At roundup's end, only 37 animals have been corralled instead of the hundreds the selectman promised. Besides, someone has spied him and Hester together, and he is accused of attempted rape...