Word: marquands
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WOMEN AND THOMAS HARROW (497 pp.)-John P. Marquand-Little, Brown...
...Marquand novels, the women all want to live on Easy Street and the men never can decide what street they want to live on. The hero of the latest Marquand. Playwright Tom Harrow, has been living on Easy Street for a quarter-century, and his wives with him. Now, with financial disaster an accomplished fact, his third wife, once a beautiful actress lately going a little ripe, pastes him with a shocking half-truth: "And what did I get? It's about time someone told you - a conceited, washed-out. middle-aged has-been, and not even much...
...fault, it is that he gives his first loyalty to the theater, something that not even an actress can forgive. But in any case, Emily no longer matters much to Tom. It is Rhoda, his first wife and only love, who fills his thoughts. Any Marquand fan knows what happens next: a flashback (by the best flashback man in the business since Proust) that illuminates the whole life, the loyalties and griefs, the prejudices and honest confusion of a man of good will who lives in a world he helped to make but does not like...
...Marquand has written this novel before, parts of it, at least, in Point of No Return. Even the town is the same-Clyde, Mass.-and the home-town kid who has made good is full of the knowledge that you can't go home again. But this time it is the boy who belonged to the town's upper crust and the girl who lived on the dreary lower-lower level. Tom had first seen Rhoda coming from a typing class, and after that there was really no other woman for him, except on the rebound...
...somehow their lives, loves and labors leave the cuprous taste of pennies in their mouths; the middle-income bracket is their social vise. Few writers have probed the masked anxieties of the "have-not-enoughs" with the skill and authority of John (The Wapshot Chronicle) Cheever, 46. After Marquand, he is the ablest chronicler of the interior life of the organization...