Marquand on Manhattan

So LITTLE TIME -- John P. Marquand --Little-Brown ($2.75).

Satirist John Phillips Marquand, who told off the foibles and failings of New England in The Late George Apley, Wickford Point and H. M. Pulham, Esquire, herewith tells off Manhattan and its intellectual suburbs, rural Connecticut and Hollywood, in 595 pages. Almost all of them are interesting, a few quite funny, and one or two as profound as Marquand is ever likely to write. The Book-of-the Month Club, which receives three or four puffs in the course of the novel, made So Little Time its September selection.

As in Marquand's other satires of blue-blooded (but white-corpuscled) New Englanders, there is almost no story, but such story as there is is sieved through the mind of one person. The sieve in So Little Time is Jeffrey Wilson, a fiftyish, talented doctor of other people's ailing plays. Jeffrey is ailing himself, for he is troubled with a vague, chronic anxiety about the emptiness of contemporary U.S. life and the immediate prospect of far-reaching social changes.

Between October 1940 (when the novel begins) and Pearl Harbor (when it ends), only ordinary things happen to Jeffrey. Madge, his socialite wife, constantly complains that he never tells her anything (she usually fails to see the point of what he does tell her). He dallies for a few months in the Hollywood home of an actress, an old friend, and learns that he cannot write a play. His elder son, Jim, quits Harvard to join the army and marry a girl Madge does not approve. But on these bare bones Marquand has molded the flesh of Jeffrey Wilson's memories, turns them into vivid, detailed, often moving episodic stories. So skilfully does Marquand recapture the mood of middle-class U.S. life during the last 35 years that most readers will overlook the artificiality of the flashback technique.

The Author. Novelist Marquand resembles Jeffrey Wilson more than the protagonists of his three New England novels. Born in 1893, he grew up in Newburyport, Mass., went to Harvard, worked on the Boston Transcript, served in France during World War I. After a year on the New York Tribune, he tried advertising, became one of the Satevepost's most skillful authors. In his Satevepost days Mar quand created the character of Mr. Moto, a sapient Japanese detective. After Pearl Harbor Marquand interned Mr. Moto. Said Marquand: "I rather liked him . . . but now it seems I had him all wrong. A veritable wolf in sheep's clothing."

He also said: "These are hard times for a writer to find anything to write about because the world is changing so fast that any contemporary subject is likely to be outdated by the time it is published." Readers of So Little Time will see how cleverly clever Author Marquand has got around that one.

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