→ January 24, 2008
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The Age of Innocence.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now known as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), with good reason, as Wharton uses the classic love triangle formula to expose the darker side of the seemingly idyllic Gilded Age of the late 1800s while also incorporating some savage wit. It’s also in the Novel 100 (#61), the Modern Library 100 (#58), and the Radcliffe 100 (#42), although it was published two years too early for TIME‘s top 100 list.

Age‘s main character is Newland Archer, a young lawyer in the social elites of New York in the 1870s who is about to marry the pretty but dull May Welland, a socially acceptable match and one he doesn’t question until he meets her cousin, the Countess Olenska. The Countess has just returned to the United States after fleeing a disastrous marriage in Europe to a man who used her ill (although his exact crime is never defined, I inferred that he was beating her), and Archer finds himself drawn to her in an obsession laden with sexual overtones. He ultimately has to choose between his engagement and then marriage to a woman he likes, but for whom he has no passion, and the woman who ignites his passion but for whom he’d have to abandon his family and status while flying in the face of all social conventions.

For a novel built around a serious idea, the choices people have to make between conforming to societal norms and following the riskier paths that offer a chance for greater happiness, Wharton manages to incorporate some bitterly sarcastic humor.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.

No one is spared, but Wharton has a particular enmity for the small-mindedness of the pro-propriety set, who conspire first to send Countess Olenska back to her husband and later to keep her and Newland apart.

On top of the love triangle and its underlying story about choice, The Age of Innocence reflects the social upheaval of the interwar period in which it was written. May Welland represents the longing for the pre-war period, a true age of innocence in which the U.S. hadn’t been embroiled in a major conflict since the Civil War, and prosperity and opulence seemed guaranteed. The Countess represents the future, from the vantage point of the end of World War I, from America’s increasing involvement with foreign nations to the uncertain economic outlook (the book was written in 1920, before the great bull run of the 20s) to the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. Wharton comes down clearly in favor of the forward-looking viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Newland and the Countess live happily ever after.

The Age of Innocence is comfortably in the top 20-25 books I’ve read, more evidence that the most fertile period for the American novel was the time between the wars. It’s an outstanding marriage – pun intended – of wicked humor and social commentary, with a simple plot made interesting through strong characterization.

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→ December 19, 2007
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A Death in the Family.

James Agee’s A Death in the Family is praised as an American classic, as a lyrical account of the death of a 36-year-old father of two and the effect this has on his family. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958.

I hated it.

Yes, there is an inherent sorrow in the event at the book’s center, based on the death of Agee’s father when Agee himself was just six years old (the age of the older child, Rufus, in the book). Jay Follet gets a call in the middle of the night that his ill father is nearing death, and he races up to try to get there before the old man dies. It turns out to be a false alarm, and on the way home, Follet dies in a one-car accident. I think we can all agree that that’s a pretty awful turn of events.

What Agee does from there – and in his defense, he had not finished working on the book at the time of his own death at age 45, with publication and a Pulitzer Prize coming two years after he died – left me cold. The constant changes of perspective, flitting from one character’s mind to another’s and back and forth in time, break any emotional connection the reader might have with the thinly-drawn characters. Follet’s wife/widow, Mary, is depicted with broad brush strokes as a staunchly Catholic woman drawn deeper into her faith (which isolates her from the rest of her agnostic family, who didn’t approve of her marriage to Jay in the first place) but with little voice of her own. Rufus gets the best material in a passage that describes his first meeting after the accident with the neighborhood toughs who pick on him daily, but by that point, I’d checked out emotionally. As for the lyrical prose, I must have missed it; there wasn’t a phrase or a passage that stuck with me for more than a few seconds, and I often found myself skimming paragraphs (Agee could have stood to shorten those) to try to get back to the dialogue. Yet somehow, this book won the Pulitzer – okay, I suppose I should stop pretending that means something, because it doesn’t, and being dead absolutely helps your chances of winning – and made the TIME 100, which has been a much more reliable reading guide. I suppose everyone’s entitled to a miss every now and then.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ October 31, 2007
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All the King’s Men.

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men took me a bit by surprise. It’s always pitched as a story based heavily on the life of Huey “Kingfish” Long, the popular and populist governor of Louisiana who was later assassinated by the son-in-law of a political rival. I expected a fictionalized biography, but in fact, the Long character, known as Willie Talos (also known as Willie Stark, but more on that in a moment), is a secondary figure in the book. Talos’ figure does loom large within the book, but his character isn’t as rounded as the Burden character is, and in fact none but Jack Burden and Anne Stanton are fully fleshed out. If you enter the book knowing that Burden himself is both narrator and subject, you’ll find the opening two chapters easier to understand.

All the King’s Men is the narrator’s story, not Talos’. The ominously-named Burden is a writer on the politics beat for a daily newspaper, and he ends up assigned to follow Talos on his first campaign for the gubernatorial seat, beginning a partnership that leads to a Chief of Staff-like role for Burden in Talos’ cabinet. Burden’s narrative moves back and forth through time, taking us at various points to his childhood friendship with the Stanton siblings, including a never-quite-finished romance with Anne Stanton; his first meeting with Willie Talos, and then later the epiphany that turns Talos from a pawn into a king in the state’s political arena; and a long and pivotal story from the distant past in Burden’s family, the story of Cass Mastern.

Mastern’s tale is critical to the book and also to understanding the two versions of the book that are in print today. Mastern was Jack’s father’s uncle, and while he was a university student prior to the Civil War, he had an affair with the wife of one of his closest friends, leading to the cuckolded man’s suicide. This sets off a chain of events that leaves Cass feeling the weight of a tremendous guilt for the various lives his selfishness has ruined and pushes him into a long search for redemption. It appears, at first blush, to have little to do with Jack Burden, but as the novel continues to unfold the events in its present time, Burden – who says at the time he tells Cass’ story that he can’t understand why Cass acted the way he did – faces a very similar chain of events, caused not by his own selfishness but by an act he believes to be compassionate, and then he feels he may have “come to understand” the actions of his great-uncle. It is complex storycraft, exploring deep and borderless themes of guilt, redemption, and the difference between how we feel when we undertake an action and how we feel when we see all of its consequences from a later vantage point.

Unfortunately, the editors at Harcourt Brace in the 1950s kept sharpened hatchets on their editing desks and did a number on Warren’s original manuscript. Two of their changes stand out for their awfulness. One was to split the Mastern story apart into its own chapter, obscuring the connection between that tale and the start of the parallel tale in Jack Burden’s life, all because they felt the combined chapter (100 pages in the 2001 hardcover edition) was too long. The other was to change the name of Willie Talos, which they felt was too ethnic, to Willie Stark, a name with a rather obvious connotation that doesn’t fit the character that well. Talos was a minor figure in Greek mythology charged with protecting the island of Crete, a big fish in a small pond much as Willie is in his own state. (If you want to read two professionals engage in a juvenile spat over the dueling versions, check out this back-and-forth between Noel Polk, the professor responsible for publishing the restored edition of Warren’s original manuscript, and Joyce Carol Oates, a novelist who wrote a piece arguing in favor of the bowdlerized version.)

I read the restored original edition, and found that Warren’s demarcation of chapters, his grammatical idiosyncrasies, and his nomenclature all worked well. It’s a story of limited redemption, a little like The Kite Runner without as much wrenching emotion, rather than the epic political drama that it’s reputed to be. (This may have something to do with the 1949 film version, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.) Warren can be a bit verbose, but the resolution of the story’s spiderweb subplots is masterful, down to the disintegration of the artificial social structure Talos has built around him. The novel appears on the TIME All-TIME 100 Novels list, and on the Modern Library and Radcliffe lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. And with good reason.

(Amazon is selling the 2006 trade paperback version, using the 1951 edited text, for a discounted price of $4.99, but this may only be for a limited time.)

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ September 18, 2007
→ By

Empire Falls.

The moral of this story is that I need to listen to my readers when they recommend a book, because they’re two for two so far. The most recent successful suggestion is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

The book’s jacket describes Russo as a “compassionate” writer, which sounds like something that some halfwit in marketing came up with after reading two or three pages of the book, but it turns out to be an incredibly apt description of the way Russo creates and develops his characters. Empire Falls is set in a declining mill town in Maine, and the plot centers on the slightly hapless Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, father of a teenaged daughter, en route to a divorce from his longtime wife Janine, who is leaving him for Walt Comeau, the “Silver Fox” who owns the local gym and is forever challenging Miles to an arm-wrestle. His daughter, Tick, is having her own troubles, including an ex-boyfriend with anger issues, a classmate with a terrible family life and who never speaks, and difficulty dealing with her parents’ divorce, which she squarely blames on her mother. And Russo has populated the town with a number of other characters, all surprisingly well developed despite limited screen time, from Miles’ kleptomaniac father, Max, to the young and possibly gay Catholic priest Mark, to the omnipresent town matriarch, Francine Whiting, who has Miles and perhaps the rest of the community by the balls. Yet with perhaps the sole exception of that last character, everyone in the book is presented with some degree of compassion or at least understanding – people are shaped by their circumstances, some of which are beyond their control, and while many people manage to overcome disadvantageous backgrounds, it’s too easy just to pile blame on those who can’t or won’t.

The story revolves around Miles Roby’s divorce and some of the events in his life that the arrival of the actual legal event (as opposed to the end of his marriage, which happened some time prior to the book’s opening) sets in motion. He has spent twenty years of his life at the restaurant, forever awaiting the day when Francine Whiting will give him the restaurant, probably through her death, which doesn’t seem all that imminent. Russo tells Miles’ story through intermittent flashbacks and changes in perspective, revealing in stages the history of the Whitings, Miles’ family history, and even some of the stories behind the other characters. And since the town is so small, all of the stories intersect at multiple points with other stories, characters run into other characters, and in very thin sheets Russo gives us more and more details on each of them.

The book also reads as an allegorical history of small-town New England, which is dotted with slumping or failing former mill towns that have never really recovered from the end of the area’s textile industry. Empire Falls residents continue to cling to hopes that the mill will re-open and that those who remained will get their old jobs back, remembering, perhaps, good old days that weren’t all that good, and that aren’t coming back even if the town does find a new industry.

The story finally turns in its last fifty or so pages on the one real event of the book, the external stimulus that shocks Miles out of his emotional stupor. It was foreshadowed for a while in the book, but Russo handled it deftly and quickly, almost as if he disdained writing about action when he had dialogue and introspection to write.

A couple of quick notes:

  • This is the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that I’ve read, and it’s been a mixed bag. Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird are among my favorite novels, but Independence Day was disappointing, and I thought The Shipping News managed the twin feat of being vulgar and uninteresting.
  • I was helping out at the Tepper School of Business’s table at an MBA recruiting event on Sunday, and had my copy of Empire Falls sitting on the table. One prospective student noticed it hidden behind a sign, pointed, and just said, “Great book.” Turns out he’s a Mainer and thought that Russo did a fantastic job of capturing the culture of the state’s small towns.
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