Word: pulsebeat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WEST, by Frank Norris (362 pp.; Harper: $3.95), proves once again that imitating J. P. Marquand is tricky business. The danger: instead of capturing the hypnotic quality of Marquand's even-tempered prose, the writer may find he has only reproduced Marquand's low emotional pulsebeat. In this 1957 Harper Prize Novel, Author Frank Norris* does not quite get out of this Marquandary. His hero, George Hanes, is cut to the Marquand measure; he is an Ivy Leaguer (Princeton '01), a professional man (architect), unhappily married, and an ineffectual struggler against the leg irons of convention...
...strains on John and Mary's marriage are, luckily, all external. John is a good writer gone wrong as an advertising manager. John's boss is the bottom-pinching proprietor of an outfit that manufactures "PulseBeat Eternal Non-Magnetic" watches. Trouble arrives with Besame Bessamer, the boss's stepdaughter, whose pulse beat, particularly when she is near John, is entirely too magnetic. Along the way of his thin plot, Author Tanner looses his most devastating attacks on flossy Manhattan restaurants and nightclubs catering to lovers of bad food, overpriced booze and rotten entertainment-the result being...