Word: return
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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 audience will...
...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...
Insists Marquand: "I still don't think [Wickford] is like my family." But, Apley and Wickford included, his best writing has been about the lives and locales he has known from boyhood. He thinks B.F.'s Daughter, which preceded Point of No Return, failed to come off because its locale, wartime Washington, was a transient experience for him. The middle-class axis he draws on best runs from Newburyport to Boston to New York...
Heads v. Walls. In Point of No Return, readers will find the most skillful elaboration of the typical Marquand novel theme. Charley Gray, the boy from Spruce Street, does well enough in life, but there are some things he cannot attain when he most wants to, some things he can never attain. He cannot close the gap between Spruce Street and aristocratic Johnson Street in his boyhood town of Clyde, Mass, (for which, perhaps, read Newburyport). Jessica Lovell lived on Johnson Street and was in love with Charley Gray, but it was clear from the start that snobbery wouldn...