Word: wouk
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...Wouk is no tractmonger. He is first and last a topnotch storyteller, and his readers know it. Marjorie seemed slated to be a runaway bestseller. It was the unanimous choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club judges for September, and the publishers, Doubleday, took the hard-headed gamble of an initial printing of 100,000 copies...
...Then, on the eve of Noel Airman's first Broadway opening, Lady Brett Ashley wins out over Shirley, in a Central Park South hotel room. This may well be the longest to-do over the loss of a girl's virginity since Richardson's Pamela. Says Wouk defensively: "Some people may get impatient and think, 'She's going to sleep with this guy, what's all the fuss?' But it's still a great suspense thing to a girl. If you don't think so, take a poll. The question...
...Author Wouk is at his best when he pictures the rarely described world of Manhattan's Upper West Side, which one of his characters calls the "gilded ghetto." Wouk knows its customs, prejudices, social gradations, e.g., West End Avenue is a worse address than Central Park West; mothers run a secret service on eligible suitors as efficiently as any conducted in Junior League territory. Most amusing and effective are Wouk's accounts of big family occasions, e.g., the mammoth bar mitzvah* with its ostentatious but somehow touching banquet that finds Marjorie's brother making a grand entrance...
...such scenes Wouk gives his people a special tang and zest. A Passover dinner at the Morgensterns' is turned into a hilarious romp by a progressively raised brat named Neville ("The Devil") Sapersteen, who bites little girls in the rump and needs 47 toy airplanes handy at all times in an open suitcase because, as the mother explains, they're "a sort of security symbol." ("Morris, leave the lid up or he'll get a trauma...
...Author Wouk builds up real suspense about the question of whom Marjorie will finally marry-a reformed Noel, a romantic Eden, a successful Wally, or plain Dr. Shapiro. The last chapter finds her a contented matron of Mamaroneck, who in her memory has revamped the past to suit the present. As she gets a little high and waltzes alone to the strains of Falling in Love with Love, she seems for a moment like the dream girl of old. But the moment passes. An old beau who is visiting her decides: "You couldn't write a play about...