The novels of John P. Marquand are no closer to a revival than when I last wrote about them in COMMENTARY in 1987. To be sure, Marquand’s melancholy, satire-flecked studies of middle- and upper-middle-class American life were immeasurably popular in the 40’s and 50’s, but they are largely forgotten today, save for The Late George Apley, which won their author a Pulitzer Prize long, long ago. The Library of America shows no signs of taking an interest in Marquand’s oeuvre, and virtually all of his books have gone out of print. Fortunately, they sold so well when they were new that they’re easy to find on the used-book market, and I commend seven of them--Apley, H.M. Pulham, Esquire, Wickford Point, So Little Time, Point of No Return, Sincerely, Willis Wayde and Women and Thomas Harrow–to the attention of anyone in need of high-quality vacation reading.

It happens that I just got back from a visit to the small Missouri town where I grew up. A copy of Point of No Return, Marquand’s best novel, can still be found on the bookshelves of my mother’s house, and so I decided to read it again for the first time in a number of years. Once more I found myself caught up in the tale of Charles Gray, a small-town Massachusetts boy turned Manhattan banker who takes stock of his life to date and finds it inexplicably unsatisfying. I was so impressed that I looked up what I’d written about the book in “Justice to John P. Marquand,” my COMMENTARY essay, and found that I hadn’t changed my mind one bit:

Viewed from a technical standpoint, Point of No Return is quite impeccable. The satirical scenes are for the first time in Marquand’s work wholly integrated into the overall texture of the novel. The framing action has the economy of a short story, while the long central flashback is handled with cinematic fluidity. Moreover, Point of No Return is one of the few genuinely convincing treatments of the business world to appear in [American] fiction. Anyone who has traveled the long road that leads from a small-town childhood to an urban career will immediately appreciate the sympathetic accuracy with which Marquand has portrayed Charles Gray’s transformation into a polished banker.

That last sentence goes to the heart of the matter. When I first read Point of No Return, I was stuck by the precision with which it conveys what it feels like to partake of an experience that was and is central to American life. The Great Gatsby, to my mind the great American novel, tells a similar story more artfully, but also with a heightening touch of melodramatic lyricism that is necessarily less true to life. Not so the plainer-spoken Marquand. Writing in 1949, he suggested with uncanny exactitude much of what I felt when I came to New York as a young man some three decades later.

I especially like the scene in which Charles Gray arrives at Grand Central Station in 1930, having put his troubled past behind him to come looking for a job:

Outside the station, the streetcars and the traffic were already running in a steady stream under the ramp at Pershing Square. The shops on Forty-Second Street, the drugstores, the optical stores and haberdasheries, were already opening for the day. When he reached Fifth Avenue the lions in front of the Public Library looked white and cold and those old buses with the seats on top were moving in lines on the Avenue, but New York was sleepy still. New York had the appearance of having been up very late, and everyone on the streets had a patient, complaining look of having been routed too early out of bed. As he walked up the Avenue the city seemed to him as impersonal as it always did later and he loved that impersonality. Now that he had left his bag at the parcel room there was nothing to tie him. The tides of the city moved past him and he was part of the tide. His own problems and his own personality merged with it.

Point of No Return is by no means a great novel, nor was Marquand a great novelist, but I do think it says something about the American experience that few other writers have succeeded in putting on paper. It deserves to be remembered–and read.