Word: noel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...When Noel gets around to shredding Margie's shirtwaist in his cabin one cozy evening, Margie does a sudden uncooperative freeze. Noel turns eloquently nasty and, incidentally, states the main theme of the book: "Your name is Shirley," he tells Marjorie, "the respectable girl, the mother of the next generation, all tricked out to appear gay and girlish and carefree, but with a terrible threatening solid dullness jutting through, like the gray rocks under the spring grass in Central Park . . . What [Shirley] wants is what a woman should want . . . big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture...
What indeed? For 417 pages, Margie is a virgin on the verge. Then, on the eve of Noel Airman's first Broadway opening, Lady Brett Ashley wins out over Shirley, in a Central Park South hotel room. This may well be the longest to-do over the loss of a girl's virginity since Richardson's Pamela. Says Wouk defensively: "Some people may get impatient and think, 'She's going to sleep with this guy, what's all the fuss?' But it's still a great suspense thing to a girl...
...Mamaroneck. When Noel's play and his affair with Margie both turn out to be flops, he flees to Paris, but Margie follows him, still determined to lasso the cad with a wedding ring. Aboard ship she meets another charmer, Mike Eden, who has a bad case of nerves, but for good cause: he is playing Scarlet Pimpernel in Nazi Germany and smuggling out persecuted Jews. Still, Noel has a fatal hold on her, and she finally catches up with him, only to find him living with and off a lady photographer...
...Noel as a brilliant, devastating heel-a West Side version of a Scott Fitzgerald hero-rarely rings true. But his deterioration and his ultimate meaning are convincing. "He takes the current myths for solid facts," says one character about him. "It never occurs to him that the Oedipus complex really doesn't exist, that it is a piece of moralistic literature. He's as orthodox as your own father, Marjorie, in his fashion . . . making a life's work out of being dogmatic, clever, supercilious-and inwardly totally confused and wretched...
Author Wouk builds up real suspense about the question of whom Marjorie will finally marry-a reformed Noel, a romantic Eden, a successful Wally, or plain Dr. Shapiro. The last chapter finds her a contented matron of Mamaroneck, who in her memory has revamped the past to suit the present. As she gets a little high and waltzes alone to the strains of Falling in Love with Love, she seems for a moment like the dream girl of old. But the moment passes. An old beau who is visiting her decides: "You couldn't write a play about...