Word: pointing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...spiritual props to make life bearable. The question Author Marquand's book raises is: "Are the rewards of all your efforts worth the effort?" But Charley Gray himself may be too busy even to hear the issue stated. Like an aircraft pilot who has passed his own point of no return-the point on a long flight where it takes more gas to go back than to go on to his destination-Charley has to keep going...
This spring, a great many U.S. readers (including thousands of Charley and Nancy Grays) will be reading Point of No Return on commuting trains and at home, after the family car has been run into the garage. Ineligible for Book-of-the-Month Club selection because Marquand is one of the club's five* judges (it can and will be a B-O-M "dividend" book), the novel has already gone through four printings totaling 80,000 copies. Wiseacres in the publishing business look upon the figure as a mild beginning...
...Apley to B.F.'s Daughter, have sold 2,600,000 copies. Three of them were book-club choices (H.M. Pulham, Esquire and So Little Time, Book-of-the-Month; B.F.'s Daughter, Literary Guild) ; three of them made box-office movies. Whatever the critics may say about Point of No Return (Marquand says, "I take a dim view of all serious critics-I don't know any who've had a kind word to say for me, ever since I was a little boy"), it is a sure bet that the U.S.'s big Marquand...
...didn't have any more money [after the crash of 1907]. I could feel myself becoming what [Anthropologist W. L.] Warner calls 'mobilized downward.' Of course, I had read Horatio Alger and I was ready to face this change in circumstance in a sportsmanlike manner." In Point of No Return it is Anthropologist Malcolm Bryant who explains such niceties of the scientific vocabulary to Charley Gray...
...Wickford Point, which he finished next, he drew on Newburyport detail, conventionally disguised, for "a story on the various relationships of a family." Some of Marquand's own family thought he drew too close. His cousins the Hales, and Renee Oakman Bradbury decided that they had been drawn to the life, that Wickford Point itself was the old family estate of Curzon Mill. Spurred in part by a sense of having served as Marquand's models, the cousins have so far successfully blocked Marquand in a project on which he has his heart set: purchase of the whole...