The Late George Apley
by John P. Marquand
Summary
George Apley of Beacon Street is dead, and his son John has asked Mr Horatio Willing, family friend and professional memorialist, to write the life, with rather more candour than Willing thinks proper. The novel is Willing's finished manuscript: letters, diaries and documents strung together with his own commentary, subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir.
The joke, sustained for the whole book, is that Willing is precisely the kind of man the book is about, and every act of discretion he performs tells you what he is hiding. George's youthful romance with an Irish girl from South Boston is handled in a paragraph of exquisite embarrassment. The family scandals, the affairs, the drinking, the relations who had to be quietly managed, all arrive wrapped in Willing's assurances that they signify nothing.
Under the comedy is a genuinely sad book. George Apley is intelligent enough to see the bars of his cage, and at intervals he rattles them: a fishing camp he loves, a rebellion or two, letters to his son that admit more than he can say aloud. Every time, Boston closes back over him. He spends his life administering trusts, sitting on boards and defending an order he privately suspects has already ended.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, and the pleasure is all in the voice, which requires a taste for irony played absolutely straight.
Best for readers who like their satire dry, patient and cumulative, and who suspect that a life can be wasted politely.
Historical Context & Significance
The Late George Apley won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1938 and was a bestseller. Reassessments in The Atlantic have treated it as the lasting fictional monument to the nation's Protestant elite.
The prize did something odd to its author. John P. Marquand was famous, and slightly embarrassed to be, as the creator of Mr Moto, the Japanese agent of his popular spy serials. Apley was his bid to be taken seriously, and it worked: Life could describe him in the early 1940s as the most successful novelist in the United States, and he spent the next two decades producing patient, ironic novels of professional men measuring their cages, Point of No Return the best of them.
The reputation did not hold. Edmund Wilson attacked him in 1945, the Book of the Month Club association told critics he need not be read closely, and after the 1960s he fell out of the conversation almost completely, a fall his defenders have been protesting ever since. The novel became a Broadway play in 1944 and a film with Ronald Colman in 1947.