Wickford Point

by John P. Marquand

- A rediscovery. WICKFORD POINT follows "The Late George Apley as the second of Marquand's acclaimed and bestselling novels that Back Bay has restored to print.- John P. Marquand is regarded as one of the 20th century's masters of sophisticated domestic fiction, occupying a midpoint on the spectrum between Edith Wharton and John Cheever. On the heels of The Late George Apley, the novel for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, John P. Marquand turned his gently satiric gaze on his own profession-the writing life-in this delectable portrait of a stagnant yet distinguished literary family in early 20th-century Boston. Jim is the only member of the extended Brill family at Wickford Point ever to have any money in his pocket. The rest of the Brills siphon gas from his car and overdraw their accounts with the cheerful abandon of those who have always been taken care of. In New England the Brills are cultural and literary royalty with an intellectual lineage that hasn't so much been inherited by the younger generation as it has fed an attenuated languor. The Brills are content to live off the implications of their name alone. And even as Jim laughs at his eccentric cousins, he cannot help being drawn back to Wickford Point, home to a gentle northern air that fills him with an inexorable sadness, but a place to which, ultimately, he belongs.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, American, Novels, 20th Century, Classics, Historical Fiction

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1938 for The Late George Apley

John Phillips Marquand (November 10, 1893 – July 16, 1960) was an American writer. Originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories, he achieved popular success and critical respect for his satirical novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938. One of his abiding themes was the confining nature of life in America's upper class and among those who aspired to join it. Marquand treated those whose lives were bound by these unwritten codes with a characteristic mix of respect and satire.

By the mid-1930s he was a prolific and successful writer of fiction for slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Some of these short stories were of an historical nature as had been Marquand's first two novels (The Unspeakable Gentleman and The Black Cargo). These would later be characterized by Marquand as “costume fiction”, of which he stated that an author “can only approximate (his characters) provided he has been steeped in the (relevant) tradition”. Marquand had abandoned “costume fiction” by the mid-1930s.

In the late-1930s, Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class, most centered on New England. The first of these, The Late George Apley (1937), a satire of Boston's upper class, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1938. Other Marquand novels exploring New England and class themes include Wickford Point (1939), H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and Point of No Return (1949). The last is especially notable for its satirical portrayal of Harvard anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose Yankee City study attempted (and in Marquand's view, dismally failed) to describe and analyze the manners and mores of Marquand's Newburyport

Reviews

[Texbritreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long ago in the first half of the 20th century, John P.Marquand began his literary career writing stories for the old-time "slicks" like The Saturday Evening Post becoming most popular for his Mr. Moto series; he then progressed to a successful career as a best-selling novelist, winning a Pulitzer for The Late George Apley. I had read his 1946 novel B.F.'s Daughter as a teenager after finding a nice copy with it's original dust jacket at a library book sale. It was quite a good book and the basis of a minor Barbara Stanwyck film, but I didn't feel compelled to rush out and read his other works. In fact the copy of Wickford Point I own was one I picked up along with a few others that were part of the old Time Readers Program, the chief appeals being their cover art and low price. So the quality of this novel came as a surprise.

Marquand's semi-autobiographical story is told in the first-person by Jim Calder, a successful magazine writer from an old literary New England family who is thinking of beginning a novel. Prompted by the pompous and adulatory novel in progress of a former classmate, Harvard professor Allen Southby, he feels he should tell the tale of his famous Brill kin and their home, Wickford Point, rather than allowing them to be preempted by the miscomprehending Southby.

The book is beautifully constructed, alternating between Jim's life in 1939 and his reminiscences; starting with his early years when as an orphaned boy he first came to live at Wickford Point with his Great Aunt Sarah and Cousin Sue, the narrative moves seamlessly through school, college, service in WWI and his ex-pat years in China before Jim returns home to try his hand at writing.

Marquand strikes just the right balance between sharp satire and loving nostalgia as he acquaints us with Calder's progenitors and extended family. The admirably self sufficient, well ordered life of tough, old Aunt Sarah and the long-suffering life of service endured by Cousin Sue are the antithesis of the family's younger members. The portraits of these clannish, indolent relatives, crippled with inertia, trapped by small trust incomes and snobbism based on the past intellectual glories of their ancestors are both comic and tragic. Cousin Clothilde forever borrowing cigarettes while lamenting about how everyone depends on her and yet clinging tightly to her four children lest they should develop lives apart from her; her largely absent second husband, the blowhard artist Archie Wright; oldest son Tom forever changing jobs; hypochondriacal brother Sid; emotional and frustrated sister Mary and lastly, baby sister, Bella. Bella, the beautiful,self absorbed, schemer whose actions will drive much of Marquand's subtle and insightful plot. And yet Jim loves them, is drawn to them and even more loves and is drawn back to Wickford Point, the crumbling farm that is a kind of timeless, enchanting netherworld whose living denizens are affected by it's ghosts in much the same way as the lotus-eaters were by the lotus plants.

Since the protagonist is a writer, we hear his ideas about writing including many observations doubtlessly felt by the author himself. The descriptions of his encounters with his literary agent as well as his thoughts on the challenges of writing, the debilitating effects of setting out to write a "masterpiece" and the necessity of natural talent are very interesting, particularly in light of Marquand's place in literary history.

It's strange how literary reputations work, much as some authors are undeservedly popular at a given time, others are undeservedly forgotten as time passes. I would argue, based on this novel, that perhaps Marquand is one of these. Seeking out a bio after completing this book I learned that although Marquand, who died in 1960, received a Pulitzer and was appreciated by some contemporary critics; he was generally disparaged by most of literary academia and later ignored.

The reasons most sighted for this were: firstly, that he was too admiring of the upper classes and despite his satirizing them he apparently enjoyed consorting with and emulating them too much in his private life; secondly, he was too commercial - starting in the "slicks" which were read by the masses and being frequently optioned and adapted in Hollywood; and lastly, that he didn't have a modern enough style - Hemingwayesque, Faulknerian, stream of consciousness etc.

Fortunately as the years roll on, personalities, literary juvenilia, commercial success and the vagaries of style are less important but I couldn't help wondering what Marquand's standing would be if he had been British instead of American. Although his subject matter and faded reputation may bring Galsworthy immediately to mind, I would suggest Waugh's life and work as a more apt comparison. And while Marquand is perhaps not quite on Waugh's level, his tendency to both satirize and admire his upper crust subjects, as Waugh did, is integrated within each work rather than evolving from early career satire to late career admiration. Either way, Galsworthy or Waugh, if Marquand was an Englishman you can bet the BBC would still be making new miniseries. And indubitably, Americans would be reading and watching right alongside them.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a paperback copy of this in the rental cabin we stayed in at Donner Lake in California --- a fifty year old paperback that sold for seventy-five cents when new. The book was originally published in 1939. What an amazing, unknown gem. This author did win the Pulitzer Prize once, but I think he's largely forgotten now. There isn't a lot of plot or action, but the character (not just a few, but lots of them) development and setting are marvelous. This is a masterful, intelligent, erudite writer. I feel fortunate to have found this, and reading it was a great pleasure.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great (autobiographic) novel by John Marquand.

3* Warning Hill
4.5* So Little Time
4* The Late George Apley
4* Wickford Point
TR Point of No Return

[Laine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite finishing this book several days ago, I find now a real longing for it. I miss the characters, wonky and shallow as they may be.... I need more! It seems to have satisfied a nostalgia for the era of my parents, my passion for 1930-40s films where manners, marriage, and money are the main themes - played out in a backdrop of flappers, prohibition and keeping up appearances. Every person we meet in this subtly satirical novel is fatally flawed, either by being born into an 'important' family or not and trying too hard to fit in amongst ones 'betters'. Every character is subjected to Marquand's cutting humor. Their flaws make them so lovable!

I'm sure not everyone's cup of tea, but a great read for clever dialog, subtle satire, class mockery, sibling insanity, dressed in New England/New York cultural milieu in an era when the trust fund and the cut of your clothes meant everything.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was engaging, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone.

The story really grabs you but I could certainly see someone who likes action and excitement wouldn't be pleased. There is definitly a large population of avid readers who would finish and just say - what? nothing happened!

For the rest of us, I would definitely recommend this book. The character development is great, it has to be, since the plot isn't very active.

The romance was new, as I typically avoid that at all costs, but it was subtle.

I love the idea of returning to home. Probably because I am a college student constantly away and longing for my next break. That idea of home is so strong to the main character. Wickford Point is a character in its own right, just as all real homes have their own being.

More thoughts to come.. I'm still soaking it up right now.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was uncertain how I would feel about this book right up until the very end, but Marquand's ability to create vivid characters and his intimate understanding of the kind of family he portrays in this novel won me over.

Wickford Point is the sleepy rural outpost of a particular type of New England family: they are greatly proud of their social status, which includes a former China sailing ship commander and a dead poet who was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, but they no longer have anyone in the family who knows how to make money, and they live on the erratic bequests that come from previous generations.

The protagonist of the story is Jim Calder, a magazine fiction writer who went to Harvard (as all the family did), served in World War I, and spends much of his time in between his other travels at Wickford Point, with its rundown buildings and sleepy river setting.

As to the other family members, each is more eccentric than the rest, and while I didn't find any of them appealing, Jim has such a deep affection for them that it constantly fights with his judgment of how foolish most of them are.

At the center of the family is his Cousin Clothilde, who constantly complains that she has to do everything for everyone else and and she needs someone to take care of her, when it is obvious that she does virtually nothing at all and expects to be waited on -- and is. There is also Harry Brill, proud of his social status, who believes that what matters more than anything is knowing the right people. He can't hold a steady job, and his condescension toward anyone who isn't part of his social circle is blatant and often cruel. His younger brother Sid has constant digestive complaints and spends his time floating from one intellectual obsession to another, again without working. Their sister Mary is highly sensitive and constantly loses out to the real star of the family, her sister Belle Brill (think Katherine Hepburn in the role).

Belle also does not work, and besides making sure she steals any man who is interested in Mary, she uses her beauty and her gift of seeming to be well informed (by borrowing snippets of conversations from others) to attract one man after another. She cannot commit to any of them -- not the dull young millionaire who first loves her, or Jim's novelist friend, whom she divorces, or a sleazy stockbroker who tries to blackmail her.

Through all of her tumultuous affairs, Belle relies on Jim Calder to bail her out, protect her, and maybe become her ultimate conquest.

It isn't ever clear why Jim remains so loyal to this family and its seedy homestead, but in the end, he must face a critical choice posed to him by his fiance.

This is a family saga and a sociological look at the impoverished gentility of New England more than a novel with any kind of concrete plot, but Marquand is such a good writer that he pulls it off.

[Dpdwyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this at a garage sale. I only picked it up because my mother had a shelf of his books when I was growing up. What a lovely surprise. Marquand takes a family of pseudo-aristocratic loafers and makes compelling characters out of them. Beautiful Bella, with her flagrant narcissistic and borderline traits, becomes a sympathetic character that I could care about. I particularly liked his droll descriptions and insights into human behavior.

Sample quotes:

“I was recalling that strange diseaselike quality which is love’s peculiar attribute and which runs its course through the patient like the depredations of some particularly vicious virus of an infiltrable nature. You got it and there you were. It was worse when you were young, for after the first attack there was a hope of developing a degree of unreliable immunity.” 108

“Susie Jaeckel was in tennis shorts. She was the type that would have done better in something else because she was overweight. If I had been a doctor I should have investigated her thyroid.” 124

“the butler... he was a dignified man past middle age, the sort with whom you might shake hands by mistake - - - and you wouldn't have minded doing it.” 125

“It is hard to understand what a woman sees in a man, because she almost always sees something that a man doesn't.” 127

“When you are young enough, I thought, all sorts of unrevealed possibilities make you a person, but afterwards when there are no more possibilities you become a type. Nearly every old man sitting about the club is a type fit into a category as readily as a butterfly or a bee or a praying mantis.” 150

[Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a bit slow going at times. It was 400-odd pages long and nothing ever really happens. But it gave an interesting glimpse of America in the 1920s and 30s. I had picked it up from the bargain shelves a while back and decided to finally sit down and read it. It's not what I'd call a real page-turner, and overall I'm pretty sure I won't read it again, but it was an enjoyable enough leisurely winter read.

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some people have compared 'Wickford Point' with 'The Great Gatsby' and I know why---the irritating characters and the plodding plot brought me right back to the east coast social scene of the twenties. Not bad enough to give up on, but had to thumb through it two days after finishing to remember what it was about.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't previously read Marquand (Pulitzer Prize winner and big time author in the 40s) and this book was so much fun. Witty writing, hilarious if not slightly demented characters, and major family dysfunction (in a good way). It does drag in parts and not a whole lot happens but I thoroughly enjoyed this.

[J.L. Askew · Rating 5 out of 5]

John P. Marquand has written a quintessential novel of manners about an old New England family in decline. Descended from poet John Brill, part of a literary circle that included Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, the Brills live at the ancestral home of Wickford Point along with Cousin Jim Calder who was orphaned as a youth. Although different from the Brills, Calder is steeped in the history of the place and forever altered by the personages who reared him and the ghosts from the past. Calder along with five generations of Brills were Harvard men and the family believes that their name is sufficient to get them through life. But Calder is different and has avoided most of the family dysfunction. Since he is the only one who is truly responsible he finds he is often called upon to rescue individuals in the family. This is especially true of his younger cousin Bella, a beautiful woman who learns to manipulate men to get what she wants. She has grown up closely dependent on Calder and their emotional bond appears doomed when she enters an ill-advised marriage with his best friend. The crisis that ensues tests Calder’s loyalty to the only family he has even known.
The book is a social satire about American society in the early twentieth century, replete with wry humor and irony. With hints of Austen, Marquand writes smartly about the changing social scene during the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression. The story is told through the viewpoint of Calder, a writer moving on the fringes of the New England literati who is finding growing success as an author.
The book is instructional as a guide for writers. Wickford Point looms large, “the heavy lassitude of too many trees and of too much summer combined with a drowsy sound of enervated birds and a muddy murky odor from the river.” Marquand moves smoothly from past to present, joining memories with conversation, revealing a place with fully wrought characters.
Although a period piece set firmly between the world wars, Wickford Point is a minor classic that still illuminates readers of today.

[Sally · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read The Late George Apley years ago and thought I'd give another of Marquand's novels a try. Wickford Point was the novel Marquand wrote after Apley. It centers on an eccentric New England family, the Brills, who live at Wickford Point, and have for several generations. The family is selfish, entropic, and make the reader feel claustrophobic. Several generations earlier one of the Brills was a transcendentalist poet, friend of Emerson and his circle. This connection both grounds the Brills and imprisons them. They talk about the same things over and over, always seem to be short of money, and all have trouble escaping from the house and the family. Jim Calder, the narrator, is a second cousin, and nearly as enmeshed as the rest. Although he actually has a job as a writer (most of the others just talk about getting jobs), he keeps going back, partly because of a fascination with his cousin Bella Brill, who thinks she's just fascinating, and easily attracts men. She can't make any true commitments, except to the family at Wickford Point, and is always being gotten out of one problem or another, usually be Jim, who seems to be about the only level-headed person there. I think a short story about the family would have been more than enough.

[Kezia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book in which New England is a character in and of itself, for me this fell in the "you had to be there" file. I've never been to New England, am not a New Anglophile, and my only context of New England is thinking The Preppy Handbook was funny in the 1980s.

The human characters weren't uninteresting, but I found them one-note. Harry is a snob. Mary is a wreck. Sid is...whatever he is. Bella is a femme fatale. Yawn. Marquand tries hard to make Bella shine, but she lacks flesh and bone underneath, and ends up a caricature anyway. Unless it was his intention to put out tropes or symbols of humans, to create paper dolls rather than fully realized humans, because mumble mumble generations of intellectual inbreeding mumble mumble allegories. I have no idea.

His characters may be weak and undercooked, but he can write, and I generally liked the story of a family in decline that doesn't quite grasp that they're in decline. And that is something that could have taken place in New England, in the South, in West Texas, in a suburb of Mexico City, or nearly anywhere. That is almost universal.

[G Daniels · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found two uses for this book:
1. A great remedy for insomnia...it can put you to sleep w/ just a few pages and
2. a remedy for a wobbly table that has one leg significantly shorter than the other.

Other than that, I found this book to be quite boring and pointless. It meandered and rambled on about nothing for over 400 pages. Don't let yourself get sucked into this long pointless story, you may keep trying to find a point to it, but there is no point to be found. It is just the rambling musing of an attempt at a Walden-like story. Mr. Marquand may have been a Pulitzer prize recipient, but it does not show itself here.

In the most base of terms, I would not recommend this book.

[Bayneeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not much happens in this book, and what does happen happens over and over again. Humorous and full of Marquand's excellent dialogue. Pretty long at 458 pages, but I was still a little sorry to have it end.

[Jo Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this very much, especially the clever dialogue. Also liked the way the book is constructed, going back and forth in time. That sometimes bothers me but it works beautifully in this book. It's a bit too long but well worth reading. Thanks Debbie!

[Mk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it. I would call it a love story or a hate story. Easy to read and interesting of the way the USA used to be.

[Samantha Glasser]

This book was on the New York Times best seller list in 1939.

[Georgia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my kind of book! Reads like a diary 😜

[ROBERT · Rating 5 out of 5]

enjoyed this book. Reminded me of "you can't take it with you"

[Catherine Brizzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Julia Rossina · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a slow-burn book. Very well written. It revokes all your senses and leaps your imagination away to the old farmhouse of New England and its weird inhabitants. A beautiful and enjoyable reading for someone who likes to follow the main character's thoughts rather than actions. When I started reading this book, my first introduction to John Marquand, I had no idea that by the middle he would already be one of my favorite writers. It's so exact, so smart and so original that I just think it's one of the best book I've ever read. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tried to update this from my phone yesterday....apparently it didn't take so I'm doing it again but since yesterday Phillip Seymor Hoffmann OD'd so this review is canceled. It's a very patient disease friends - 23 years clean doesn't mean shit if you lose your connection to God. It works if you work it...and it doesn't if you don't - The book was good too.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply psychological portrait of stasis and enervation, more successful in portraying the decay of the Brahmins than The Late George Apley. Masterful interweaving of present and past, truly virtuosic. Highly recommend.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indolent and self deluded, the Brill's are awful in their self absorption, and yet always amusing. Marquand does a great job of creating these characters and also at setting up the mood of Wickford Park, especially in bringing some specific scenes into realization.