Word: marquands
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...Wickford Point, which he finished next, he drew on Newburyport detail, conventionally disguised, for "a story on the various relationships of a family." Some of Marquand's own family thought he drew too close. His cousins the Hales, and Renee Oakman Bradbury decided that they had been drawn to the life, that Wickford Point itself was the old family estate of Curzon Mill. Spurred in part by a sense of having served as Marquand's models, the cousins have so far successfully blocked Marquand in a project on which he has his heart set: purchase of the whole...
...Insists Marquand: "I still don't think [Wickford] is like my family." But, Apley and Wickford included, his best writing has been about the lives and locales he has known from boyhood. He thinks B.F.'s Daughter, which preceded Point of No Return, failed to come off because its locale, wartime Washington, was a transient experience for him. The middle-class axis he draws on best runs from Newburyport to Boston to New York...
Along it the Marquand pattern has been evolving: the harried U.S. male battling his environment in successive generations, fighting a losing fight to lead the good life and be a good fellow while trying to be happy and be himself. Marquand's female characters are unfinished portraits, and he knows it. "I have never had a female character really steering. They are usually officious people who are rocking the boat and are worried about the butcher bill and the cat. My first wife thinks all the women are based on her, and my second wife thinks all the women...
Heads v. Walls. In Point of No Return, readers will find the most skillful elaboration of the typical Marquand novel theme. Charley Gray, the boy from Spruce Street, does well enough in life, but there are some things he cannot attain when he most wants to, some things he can never attain. He cannot close the gap between Spruce Street and aristocratic Johnson Street in his boyhood town of Clyde, Mass, (for which, perhaps, read Newburyport). Jessica Lovell lived on Johnson Street and was in love with Charley Gray, but it was clear from the start that snobbery wouldn...
Many readers will feel that they would gladly swap places with Charley and take their chances on happiness. Novelist Marquand is pretty sure that they would wind up with the same empty feeling. Says he: "Everybody says 'life is what you make it' and it seems to me, by God, it's mostly environment you're coping with and you have mighty little chance to make it yourself. I don't see that many people are particularly captains of their fate. They bat it out, but do they really get what they want...