Word: youngster
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shades of Uriah Heep. Not that it is all Willis Wayde's fault. When he first arrives at Clyde, Mass, from Denver, he is a likable youngster. But he is quickly made to feel that he and his parents are nomads from the great American desert west of Boston. His father, a brilliant, roving engineer, works at the Harcourt Mill. The Harcourts are a fine old feudal Yankee clan, and they soon inspire young Willis with the desire to be something he is not. He imitates their manners and their games, even buys (secondhand) their kind of clothes...
Willis Wayde's fiber proves much tougher than the thinning Harcourt strain, and Bess would like to love him-but how can she really love this solemn youngster who reminds her of Uriah Heep? She drops him for a gentleman who plays good tennis and wears the right kind of white ducks. At that point, a chilling transformation begins in Willis. Slowly his eagerness turns to cold ambition, his good manners into a calculating weapon, his yen to be like the Harcourts into an unconscious drive to destroy them...
...certainly," replies Willis. "It will be a pleasure, honey." Yet just as Sylvia puts up with him, so in the end does the reader. For Author Marquand manages a highly skillful double-switch with the reader's emotions. Early in the book, he smoothly turns the nice youngster into a glossy horror; later on he turns the horror into a rather sad character who compels sympathy. Novelist Marquand's plot may sag at points, but the caricature of his hero is fascinating, down to the last page, when wise and forbearing Sylvia tucks in her husband with...
Buttons Marked Moscow. "It is, I think, essential that the fun of flying be kept alive, and it is only through flying clubs that this can be done. The cheap, light airplane in which the youngster can fly around the field, and when he gets a bit better take his girl friend up too, must remain with us . . . We must keep the airplane for pleasure, for an afternoon's fun which does not need two or three thousand yards of runway, control towers and controls, and all the paper work that makes life so intolerable these days...
...aimless and faceless, in love with an equally faceless, eminently boring girl, and finally driven to leave Pompey's Head for no convincing reason. The returning adult hero has a perfunctory fling with an old flame in the big brass bed in which he slept as a youngster: "And when at last he possessed her, in a wholeness of possession he had never known or dreamed, past and present came thundering together." But the thunder is hollow: not for a moment is even the most optimistic reader allowed to think that Lawyer Page will really stay in that Southern...