Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...This novel keeps the reader in suspense at the end of every chapter-waiting for the soap commercial. Can Molly Jorgenson and Johnny Hunter, teen-age lovers and troubled children of divorce, find lasting happiness by racing the stork to the altar? Will Johnny's mother Sylvia desert her alcoholic husband, with his blue-blood pedigree and red-ink bank balance, for an adulterous affair with Molly's self-made millionaire father? Is life a game of second chance or an inescapably heir-conditioned nightmare...
...answers to these and sundry other questions are offered in a fictional session of bland man's buff by Sloan Wilson, the man who did more for gray flannel suits than Brooks Brothers. The novel's key setting is Pine Island, Me., a summer retreat and a kind of "perverted Garden of Eden from which one was expelled for the sin of poverty." Among the unexpelled nouveau poor are the Hunters, who eke out their stay as genteel innkeepers. Fortyish Bart Hunter is an existentially minded drunkard whose most cutting insult is to call someone "cheerful." His disillusioned...
...Jorgenson and Sylvia Hunter's idea of turning the clock back is to get divorced and marry each other. A couple of years pass, and as Molly and Johnny cool toward their parents, they warm to each other. In keeping with the outdoorsy spirit of the novel's amours, Molly finally succumbs to Johnny on a sand dune. The wedding bells have a somber ring, what with Molly pregnant at 17, but middle-aging Ken and Sylvia Jorgenson rally round, and Summer Place ends on a sunnily implausible note of general contentment...
...thinks, were a kind of "adolescent rebellion in reverse.") Now a dedicated writer. Wilson is nevertheless in the midst of a business coup that is interesting publishers' row a lot more than soybeans. Author Wilson has taken a baby step toward becoming a co-publisher of his own novel...
Rumer Godden's new novel starts innocently enough with five little English brothers and sisters, ranging from a few years to 16, going to France with their mother for a summer holiday. Mrs. Grey gets bitten by a horsefly and lands in the hospital, leaving the children to manage as best they can without Mum in a nearby pension on the Marne. For page upon page, everything hums along with the summery warmth of semifantasy. Greengage plums drop from the tree with juicy plops, the barges of the Marne glide noiselessly over the sunny water. The owner...