B.F.'s daughter, Paperback – January 1, 1946

This is one book by this author that I hadn’t yet read, but, like his others, it was a delight. I just love to enter the world that he writes about...one that’s so “yesterday”, and yet so real. His settings and characters are so believable, and by the end of the book I feel like I know them, and I want to learn what the future holds for them. I know it’s just a book of fiction, but it’s utterly real in my mind and emotions. He’s really a terrific author!

Burton Fulton is a nouveau riche industrialist with the common touch. He hobnobs with chauffeurs and mechanics at the companies he owns, and argues poignantly against the ideas of New Dealers who've never sweated a payroll. But now he has died, and Marquand makes him a metaphor for a dying era. World War II, we're told dozens of times, has Changed Everything.Polly, B.F.'s daughter, is trying to stay married to one of those brainy new liberals, an FDR propagandist named Tom Brett, whom she fell for because his bohemian lifestyle and his stylish rudeness excited her. He's so boyish and slovenly, with his collar half up and half down, that she thinks he needs her. But ultimately, on a decisive weekend in D.C. that frames the novel, she'll dig up the truth that he's in love with his secretary. Flashbacks in the middle of the book prove to us that Polly should have married Bob Tasmin, a solid, old-moneyed neighborhood boy in whom her father saw strength and goodness.There are other political paradigms being set up. Polly learns too late that her genetic gift for running things has been subverted by her destiny as a woman--an awareness that brings Marquand close to having written a feminist tragedy.Polly is the guilty pleasure of the novel, real, brash, sexy, and heartbreakingly forlorn, a woman who charms diplomats with the (nowadays lost) feminine art of playful conversation--all bold thrusts and parries and finding anomalies in every response. After facing death on a mission over Japan, Tasmin returns with a gloves-off, post-nuclear candor that probably would have won Polly away from Tom if he'd shown flashes of it sooner. Too devoted to his family to sleep with Polly (despite his love for her), he sends her off to her uncertain but independent future, like America's--she has been through her own War that Changed Everything.I read this to see what people were writing about during a previous wartime. The prose is from that strange gap of time when name writers were both intelligent and utterly commercial, with a foretaste of John Cheever, and the symbolism is classically satisfying, like Fitzgerald's. The drawback is that the New Dealers are so bitterly caricatured. A novelist has to operate under an almost sacred generosity of compassion, or at least forgiveness, or the reader feels used.

jp's novels are habit forming and strangely seem absolutely contemporary even though they were mainly written fifty years, half a century, ago. the novel by now is such an antique literary form but here's a real master to make us forget time passing as pages after book keep on turning. the hero of this one is very barbara stanwyck. now on to apley, the pulitzer one, which i have been hoarding.

The heroine of this novel is prohibited from using her skills and abilities because of the conventions restricting women. She is expected to always be subordinate to men and is punished for assertiveness, organization, or executive abilities. The very traits that she would have been rewarded for if she was a man. Polly Fulton was a woman born too early and in the wrong place for who she was.

Fast and reliable.

This is probably the only book that I wanted to stop in the middle of because I was too scared to see what was gonna happen next....I was very nervous about how Polly was going to tell her fam and Bob about her decision and what their reaction was gonna be. I didn't pick up the book (kindle) or 2/3 days!I also found myself slowing down and wanting to read each word very deliberately because as usual, I started by skimming over the words (like a Tweet) but then when I slowed down & took in each word, whole new worlds appeared!Last, I watched the movie with B Stanwyck (via Pinterest) and the movie couldn't hold candle to it...whenever I see big diffs between book and movie, makes me think, wow, that book must've just been fantastically crafted.

I'm not sure what to say about this book. It isn't exciting, but it isn't boring. It isn't suspenseful but it isn't entirely aimless either. The best I can say about it really is that the writing makes sense, but the plot never really takes off and leaves you wanting to race to the end.If you like books with highly thoughtful characters that can be a bit unpredictable this book will probably work for you, but if you are looking for action and adventure...probably not so much. I read this all the way through and kept expecting that something truly fantastic was going to happen eventually, but it never did.At the end of the book, I couldn't figure out how I had read so much but still felt like everything was unsettled. It's odd. That's really the best I can say.This review is base don a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.