Word: pompey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pompey's Head is not nearly as good a book as the 1949 Marquand novel it parallels, but it is one of the big hits of the literary season. The movies (20th Century-Fox) have paid a $100,000 tribute to it, the Literary Guild is carrying it into hundreds of thousands of American living rooms, and for the sixth straight week it stands at the top of the fiction bestseller list...
...bottom of this seemingly fantastic accusation? A lawyer, of course. Which lawyer? Well-it happens that the great novelist and his dragon of a wife live on a small island near Anson Page's home town of Pompey's Head. That makes Page the obvious legal knight for the dangerous mission...
...thorough job of reconstruction. His town is like one of those skillfully done scale models seen in Christmas shop windows, of which people exclaim: "My, it almost looks real!" The trouble is that nothing very interesting or moving happens in the town. There is neither humor nor tragedy in Pompey's rather empty Head-not even a good hangover...
...hero as a young man is aimless and faceless, in love with an equally faceless, eminently boring girl, and finally driven to leave Pompey's Head for no convincing reason. The returning adult hero has a perfunctory fling with an old flame in the big brass bed in which he slept as a youngster: "And when at last he possessed her, in a wholeness of possession he had never known or dreamed, past and present came thundering together." But the thunder is hollow: not for a moment is even the most optimistic reader allowed to think that Lawyer Page...
...more recently, John Brooks's A Pride of Lions. Perhaps no other literature is filled with so many revisited home towns as the American, and it may be because the emotional distance between Cardiff and London, or Lyon and Paris, seems nowhere near so great as that between Pompey's Head and New York...