Marquand, j.g.

THE SECOND HAPPIEST DAY (409 pp )--John Phillips--Harper ($3.75).

John Marquand's fellow Book-of-the-Month Club judges were not surprised when he got up and walked out of the meeting. His departure was an act of principle. For the book about to be discussed (and chosen) was The Second Happiest Day, by a young (28) first novelist named John Phillips but better known to the judges as John Marquand Jr.

Without the B-O-M accolade (and the jacket reminder that Phillips is really Marquand Jr.), the book might have been noted only as a mildly wry comedy of bad manners that borrows much of its tone from F. Scott Fitzgerald and most of its technique from that smooth architect of fiction, Pulitzer Prizewinner John P. (for Phillips) Marquand.

Author Phillips tells about his own lost generation. Gus Taylor, his hero, is a small-town Massachusetts kid of a good, middle-class family who gets in with the moneyed set at prep school. The story begins in the mid-'30s and follows Gus to Harvard, World War II and back again. Of all his pals, Gus alone seems to realize that postwar life must be more than a succession of boozy parties on Manhattan's upper East Side. He finishes at Harvard, goes to Columbia Law School and gets a good job. Author Phillips plays him off against rich George Marsh III, who writes his own checks at 14, is a hero in football and in war, and so directionless inside that every serious move in his life ends in futility. Gus steals George's girl, but she is too giddy to stick to a solid citizen like Gus, and too aware of George's weakness to go back to him. In the end, Gus gets off the gilded merry-go-round, and settles down to his job and the facts of life.

For the most part, Author Phillips-Marquand tells his story at just above the level of fashionable young folks' gossip and at something less than the depth of a good college bull session. Why the George Marsh generation is lost (if it is) is a question that is never really asked, much less answered. Author Phillips can sketch scenes of prep school, Harvard and Manhattan fast-set life that have pace and surface savvy. That is something, at 28; enough, anyway, to have turned the nodding heads of the Book-of-the-Month judges, John Marquand Sr. abstaining.

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