Books: Deflowering of New England

WICKFORD POINT—John P. Marquand —Little, Brown ($2.75).

John Phillips Marquand, 45, is a tall, blue-eyed New Englander, a successful contributor to the Satevepost, who last year won literary as well as financial success with his best-selling novel, The Late George Apley.

Lately Satevepost readers have been following his new serial, Wickford Point. It traces some 30 years in the history of the scatterbrained, snobbish, tumbledown New England Brills, from Great-Aunt Sarah, who had known the Transcendentalists, to sophisticated daughter Bella, beautiful, jaded, unhappy, to whom men were drawn as sightseers were drawn to the...