Point of No Return

Raised in the small town of Clyde, Massachusetts, Charles Gray has worked long and hard to become a vice president at the privately owned Stuyvesant Bank in Manhattan. But at the most crucial moment of his career, when his focus should be on reading his boss’s intentions and competing with his chief rival for promotion, Charles finds himself hopelessly distracted by the past.

Years ago, the Gray family was featured in a sociological study of their hometown. Charles, his sister, and their parents were classified as members of the “lower-upper class,” the unspoken strains of their tenuous social status cast in stark black and white. A chance encounter with the author of the study fills Charles’s head with memories—and when a business matter compels him to return to Clyde, it seems as if fate is intent on turning back the clock. As he reflects on the defining moments of his youth, Charles contends with one of the central mysteries of existence: how our lives can feel both predetermined and random at the same time.

Published in 1949, Point of No Return is a brilliant study of character and place heralded by the New York Times as “further proof that its author is one of the most important living American novelists.”