So Little to Say

B.F.'s DAUGHTER (439 pp.)--John P. Marquand--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Pulitzer Prize Novelist John P. Marquand remarked: "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to find anything to write about because the world is changing so fast that any contemporary subject is likely to be outdated by the time it is published." That didn't prevent him from writing the best-selling So Little Time. Nor does it now keep him from using the very confusions induced by a fast-changing world as the theme of his new novel, B.F.'s Daughter. It might well have been called So Little to Say.

B.F.'s Daughter is the November selection of the Literary Guild, and more than 800,000 copies are already in print.

B.F. is Burton Fulton, Polly's self-made father who zoomed from small-town hardware dealer to bigtime industrialist. He is Polly's hero and apparently Marquand's as well. B.F. is kindly, practical, knows how to get along with people and make money. His thinking never goes deeper than: "Any boy has a chance in America if he only sees the picture ... if he only sees the picture." He never does understand why Polly should want to ditch the Yale-bred, well-to-do childhood sweetheart she is engaged to and marry dimeless, academic New Dealer Tom Brett.

To Polly, Tom seemed an exciting escape from Bob Tasmin and the everlasting Right Thing he represented. Bob always said and did the right thing. He was Tradition: Yale, Harvard Law, handsome manners, a law career with a junior partnership at the end of a long, hard row. Tom was the new thing, the break with all tradition, the sloppy dresser, the fountain of glib ideas that would soon lift him from an underpaid Columbia instructorship to Washington and eminence as a New Deal speechwriter.

It is for Tom, the brilliantly erratic liberal, and his fellows that Novelist Marquand saves his none-too-gentle satire. "The truth was that all liberals were turning into self-righteous, complacent social snobs, and each faction was the only one that understood America." Much later, when Tom has walked out on Polly to sleep with his secretary, she sees him and his crowd clearly: "All at once enthusiasms and loyalties and beliefs became very tiresome. The intelligentsia, the bright planners, working on those streamlined blueprints for the brave new world, were always repeating themselves. . . . There was something mechanical about Tom and all those boys. . . . There was some basic lack of understanding in spite of all their aptitudes."

Novelist Marquand never pins down the confusions that wreck rich Polly Fulton's marriage. Late in the book he tries: "The war had hardly touched them physically. So what was it within themselves that had vanished? It was fantastic to believe that all that two people had shared . . . could be turned and twisted, blown to nothing by a war." How the war had done it or why is hardly clearer to the reader than it is to Polly. One suspects that it is not too clear to Mr. Marquand either. B.F.'s Daughter, an unsatisfying novel, has none of the sharpness that made The Late George Apley a definitive picture of one kind of Boston life.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.