Word: marquands
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Died. John Phillips Marquand, 66, U.S. novelist; of a heart attack in his sleep; in Newbury, Mass, (see box opposite...
...typical Marquand hero reaches the point of no return when he draws his first breath. In later years, during the inevitable, muted crises, he will ask himself where he took the decisive turn. Was it the school he went to? The wife he married, or did not marry? The job he took? His creator, one of the best social novelists the U.S.has produced, considered these questions vital. Again and again, he said that men are shaped by their environment, and no writer could match him in describing the environments that cradled or smothered, polished or abraded, buoyed or drowned...
...worked in the great tradition of Edith Wharton, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis. But where James did mannered, brilliant black-paper silhouettes of a special world and Lewis slashed unforgettable caricatures of the world at large on slightly beer-stained sketch pads, Marquand carefully painted portraits-so smooth that one never noticed the artist at work-and conceived a world narrow enough for him to master and wide enough for the reader to enter...
Author Humes does his work in flashbacks, not the smooth ones of a Marquand, but brusque revelations carved out like sections of a monument to doom. Unfortunately, he also chooses to interpolate interior monologues, which prove only that he has not read James Joyce well enough. But these form a minor irritant compared to the book's merits -clean writing, crisp description, and a surprisingly accurate sense of the bitter relationships, mostly unspoken, between the enlisted Negroes and their commander. Author Humes is no optimist. Every page of Men Die implies an underlying sense of doom for mankind...
...note. Friends from Philadelphia gives a self-made man with culture gnawing at his pride the chance to score off his Ivy elitenik neighbors with a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 1937. One of the best stories in the book, Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?, might draw a bravo from Marquand for its social surgery. At college, blueblooded Fred had got socially iffy Clayton into the best clubs. Years later, with the hourglass of fortune reversed, Fred needs work and Clayton is an advertising bigwig. At a sanctimonious lunch full of bogus bonhomie, Clayton offers Fred...