Note: Last month TCM aired the movie version of Marquand’s H.M. Pulham, Esq., directed by King Vidor in 1941. He effectively used two devices that don’t often work, the voiceover as an interior monologue and the flashback. Like the book reviewed below, the movie is about the transience of values and groping for happiness while living an unlived life. A man from a well-to-do Boston family, now middle-aged and doing the quiet desperation thing, receives two calls that shatter his fragile tranquility. Only then does he – Robert Young - look back, grappling with the question “Hedy Lemarr or Ruth Hussey – did I make the right choice?”
The Late George Apley - John P. Marquand
One would expect that a Pulitzer Prize winner for 1938 would be merely
picturesque and quaint in 2025. And it’s kind of harmless and genial, given
Marquand was ambivalent about the people he was satirizing.
Basically, it is the story of a man whose upper-class ways and traditions have narrowed his life. George Apley says, “I have always been faced from childhood by the obligation of convention, and all of these conventions have been made by others, formed from the fabric of the past. . . . They were designed to promote stability and inheritance. Perhaps they have gone a little bit too far."
This novel is so smoothly written that its 400 pages fly by fast. Marquand
sharpened his writing skills in magazine fiction and was later well-known for
his detective Mr.
Moto. Marquand tells the story of a blighted life mainly through letters,
but also uses other genres such as meeting minutes and speeches. I like a
writer who uses many devices.
This is for hardcore readers who think spending time immersed in novels by Willa Cather or Sinclair
Lewis is an utterly ordinary thing to do or those interested in the best-sellers
of bygone days like Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah.
No comments:
Post a Comment