Word: marquands
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...LITTLE TIME - John P. Marquand -Little-Brown...
Satirist John Phillips Marquand, who told off the foibles and failings of New England in The Late George Apley, Wickford Point and H. M. Pulham, Esquire, herewith tells off Manhattan and its intellectual suburbs, rural Connecticut and Hollywood, in 595 pages. Almost all of them are interesting, a few quite funny, and one or two as profound as Marquand is ever likely to write. The Book-of-the Month Club, which receives three or four puffs in the course of the novel, made So Little Time its September selection...
...Marquand's other satires of blue-blooded (but white-corpuscled) New Englanders, there is almost no story, but such story as there is is sieved through the mind of one person. The sieve in So Little Time is Jeffrey Wilson, a fiftyish, talented doctor of other people's ailing plays. Jeffrey is ailing himself, for he is troubled with a vague, chronic anxiety about the emptiness of contemporary U.S. life and the immediate prospect of far-reaching social changes...
...tell her). He dallies for a few months in the Hollywood home of an actress, an old friend, and learns that he cannot write a play. His elder son, Jim, quits Harvard to join the army and marry a girl Madge does not approve. But on these bare bones Marquand has molded the flesh of Jeffrey Wilson's memories, turns them into vivid, detailed, often moving episodic stories. So skilfully does Marquand recapture the mood of middle-class U.S. life during the last 35 years that most readers will overlook the artificiality of the flashback technique...
Almost concealed by the weight of burlesque applied with superhuman travail by Maxie lies the counterpart of the message of social snobbery which J. P. Marquand gave to the world in the now famous "Pulham." Harvard's intellectual snobbery, a form of the disease as distasteful as its social counterpart and even more prevalent around Cambridge, deserves a shellacking, but the heavy hand of Hollywood molded Maxie's opus into the general style of belly-laugh comedies, abandoning all thought of satire...