Thomas Stribling’s The Store appears to be one of the most obscure winners on the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction list; the only copy in the entire state of Delaware was at the University, and a friend in Boston reported that she could only find one copy in the area, with the other two books in this trilogy completely unavailable. You can buy it new, for $32 on Kindle or $40 in paperback, from the University of Alabama press, pricing that I interpret as an acknowledgment that if you’re looking for this book, you either really have to have it for school/work reasons, or you’re a completist trying to read the entire Pulitzer list. The cost may be the main reason the book is hard to find, but the text itself, while actually quite funny for its era and full of interesting, eccentric characters, is incredibly problematic in the pervasive racism and anti-Semitism, not just in the characters’ views but often in the descriptive prose itself. Language that may have been acceptable when Stribling wrote the book in 1931 or in the time of the book’s setting right after the Civil War is offensive today, even if you want to make a sort of park-adjustment for the context in which it was written. There are white characters in The Store who have what would have been seen as progressive views on race, but it’s hard to read it now without thinking of how backwards the rural south was for decades after the end of slavery.
The protagonist of the book is Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, who served in the Civil War but is left at odds and ends by the conclusion of the conflict, and eventually takes a job in a local general store in Florence, Alabama, with an eye towards eventually borrowing enough capital to open a store of his own. Vaiden runs afoul of his boss, who cheated Vaiden out of thousands of dollars about twenty years earlier, by refusing to short-change the black customers who come to the store, which is about as far as any white character gets in the book to an egalitarian view of the races. Eventually, the scrupulously honest Vaiden abandons his scruples when he finds a chance to get even with his former nemesis, stealing goods enough to cover his losses and then some, opening a store of his own and buying real estate, sparking a back-and-forth battle that claims at least one life and doesn’t end particularly well for anyone involved.
Along the way, Vaiden’s wife passes away – he’s really not that upset about this, as he’s constantly thinking about her as “his fat wife” – and he ends up trying to reunite with Drusilla, a woman who spurned him the night before their wedding many years before and whom he later courted and dumped for revenge. It’s not much of a romance, and when Vaiden does get married near the end of the book, it’s to Drusilla’s daughter, with this whole Electra-complex subtext that makes the result rather creepy to read.
The shame about the racism, the anti-Semitism, and the unromantic love story is that there’s a lot of dry humor and satire within the book; it’s a portrait of the postwar south, but not a nostalgic or favorable one. Stribling gives his black characters some actual depth, and the conversations they have with each other about how they don’t get the same treatment from the law that white suspects who commit the same or worse crimes do applies today just as it did a century-plus ago. Vaiden is by no means a hero; his principles shift according to his needs and circumstances, and it’s revealed over the course of the book that he committed a serious, violent crime of his own but escaped prosecution because he was white and the victim black. Economic injustice is everywhere in the story, including the fact that poor black farmers paid more for less when whites ran the only stores in town. (Vaiden seems to reflect the postwar, tacit racism, in contrast to the overt racism of many of his neighbors, as he treats his black and white tenants equally, and agrees to help one black farmer pay for artificial fertilizer to try to increase his yields.) The argument for Stribling here is that nothing about the story is unrealistic for its setting of 1870s; I’m sure the n-word was prevalent, and race relations were at least this bad in the backwoods of the south, but because the book was written in a time when blacks were still treated as inferior in every walk of life, the text is too soft on its subjects. It’s a quick read, but an uncomfortable one, to unclear benefit.
Next up: I’m most of the way through another Pulitzer winner, Margaret Ayer Barnes’ charming if dated Years of Grace.