"That Was No Lady..."

WOMEN AND THOMAS HARROW (497 pp.)--John P. Marquand--Little, Brown ($4.75).

In Marquand novels, the women all want to live on Easy Street and the men never can decide what street they want to live on. The hero of the latest Marquand. Playwright Tom Harrow, has been living on Easy Street for a quarter-century, and his wives with him. Now, with financial disaster an accomplished fact, his third wife, once a beautiful actress lately going a little ripe, pastes him with a shocking half-truth: "And what did I get? It's about time someone told you -- a conceited, washed-out. middle-aged has-been, and not even much of a lover. My God. why didn't I see the fallacy in all the lousy plays you wrote?"

Emily is too hard on Tom. He is, in fact, a pretty nice chap: humorous, too generous, and at 50-odd still fit and handsome. If his plays have not been great, they have at least been craftsmanlike and successful. If Tom has a fault, it is that he gives his first loyalty to the theater, something that not even an actress can forgive. But in any case, Emily no longer matters much to Tom. It is Rhoda, his first wife and only love, who fills his thoughts. Any Marquand fan knows what happens next: a flashback (by the best flashback man in the business since Proust) that illuminates the whole life, the loyalties and griefs, the prejudices and honest confusion of a man of good will who lives in a world he helped to make but does not like.

Marquand has written this novel before, parts of it, at least, in Point of No Return. Even the town is the same--Clyde, Mass.--and the home-town kid who has made good is full of the knowledge that you can't go home again. But this time it is the boy who belonged to the town's upper crust and the girl who lived on the dreary lower-lower level. Tom had first seen Rhoda coming from a typing class, and after that there was really no other woman for him, except on the rebound. He had just sold his first play, and in the happy Fitzgerald days he showed Rhoda a world she could not even imagine. But no matter how much Tom earned, Rhoda could not get over the fear that the theater was a precarious life. Her fetish was security, and when she met Presley Brake, founder of Monolith Security Mutual. Tom said: "I know Rhoda's going to love him." She did not, but while Tom was away in World War II, she married him.

Now Tom Harrow has lost all his money backing a dud play. He is aging, unsure of his talent, confused about life's meanings. Rhoda offers to come back, to get him out of his financial jam. But Tom knows when he has reached the point of no return. The novel's last line sounds like a Marquand parody: "In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone."

This is Marquand's most pessimistic book, for Tom Harrow, like Marquand, is not at all happy with contemporary U.S. life, "an average that expressed itself in gastronomical and in spiritual mediocrity." It is also a tired book, despite all its easy skill, its smooth and sometimes witty dialogue. Marquand's hero worries but never seems to think, and his troubles bring on at least as much irritation as sympathy. Women may be hell, and success can be a bitch goddess, but if the hapless male does no more than moon and fume, he is no more a tragic figure than the guy next door. The reader's easy, even eager, identification with that guy has long been one of Author Marquand's best fictional virtues, but it may be turning into a tiring narcissism.

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