Marquand Wife

THE SUCCESS (370 pp.)--Helen Howe--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

What John Marquand has done for the ambitious Harvardman in rebellion against his New England background, Boston-born-and-bred Helen Howe* sets out to do for the Harvardman's ambitious wife.

Fun-loving Maggie Fraser comes from the socially acceptable environs of Beacon Hill, with Faneuil blue blood on her mother's side. Maggie herself is bouncy and bossy enough to have been a queen bee at Vassar ('22). She is no beauty, but to some masculine eyes she flashes with the radiance of a "Fourth-of-July sparkler." From Vassar. Maggie marches forth to conquer Broadway, and is so chagrined by her failure that she quickly settles for marriage to Dexter Bradfield, 6 ft. 2 of Harvard muscle and inarticulateness.

Eight years later. Maggie has a daughter and a surfeit of Dexter. Then she meets Ray Masters, a Manhattan adman turned novelist, whose "brown eyes, with their heavy lashes, looked almost boldly into Maggie's.'' Dexter takes the bad news like a true son of John Harvard, and, with her second husband. Maggie at last moves into the New York-Hollywood glamour spheres she always dreamed about. But Ray's reedlike pliancy proves as irritating as Dexter's rocklike immobility. The only way to achieve success, Maggie sees, is to do it on her own and, with the men away in World War II, she does. She leaps ever higher up the dizzy crags of Madison Avenue, until she reaches the pinnacle--her own radio chatter program.

But now. like each of Marquand's heroes. Helen Howe's heroine discovers (surprise!) that success is not enough. Her husband comes home from the war dreaming of a Japanese mistress. Her daughter turns from Maggie to a tweedy aunt and the earthy delights of raising sheep dogs. An old school chum, who had stayed home all these years having babies, gains fame as a poet. Alone and unanchored. Maggie would like to believe she is simply paying the price for having lived too hard, "but fear gripped her suddenly that she had not lived at all."

Novelist Howe's book is most satisfying when it careens through the sacred precincts of Holy Old Boston. She does a brilliant autopsy on Maggie's Bradfield in-laws, with their clapboard Essex County cottages named after characters in Gilbert and Sullivan and their stupefying Sunday evenings of jolly songs, recitations and parlor games. As her first husband explains: "The whole point of a family party is that you don't have to talk. It would ruin it if you had to be thinking of things to say." But once Maggie is launched into the world beyond Boston, her own superficiality merges into the larger cultural desert. In this hostile territory. Author Howe seems nearly as dazed as her heroine and falls back on those staples of the lady novelist: faithfully recorded but unexciting dialogue, minute cataloguing of the interiors of houses and the exteriors of people.

* Daughter of M. A. DeWolfe Howe, editor and Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer; sister of radio-TV's Quincy Howe and Harvard Law School Professor Mark DeWolfe Howe.

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