Years of Grace: A Chat

Posted in Uncategorized on December 3, 2009 by Diablevert

Diablevert: So, Years of Grace. For a book where nothing happens a lot happens, you know? Do you remember the name of Jane’s friend, ol’ what’s her face? Who marries the guy Jane has the hots for?

Dreadfulpenny: The rumpled bluestocking? Agnes. It’s in my notes. I jotted some stuff down because I knew my time with the book was limited — I didn’t quite finish. The last part I got to was when Jane’s eldest daughter had her twins.

Diablevert: Let me fill you in — a few years after having her kids, her oldest hooks up with her best friend’s husband, the son of Jane’s mildly skanky friend with the curls, the two couples divorce, and Jane’s daughter marries the new guy. Also, all three of Jane’s kids unexpectedly inherit a big chunk of change from their grandfather, and each uses it to finally take off and do whatever their little heart desires. For the oldest, that means marrying her lover, and him rejoining the foreign service (they get divorced and married in Paris, his new post). For the son, he moves to Boston, buys a townhouse, and commits to some serious antiquing. For the younger daughter, she buys, with her “friend” a farm where they raise dogs and an apartment in the city where they hang out in silk pajama with playwrights and interior designers, if you get my meaning.

Dreadfulpenny: Awesome. How does Jane feel about all that? Does the artist first love ever reappear a la So Big?

Diablevert: Ah. Well, when they go to Paris for the daughter’s wedding, he shows, and Jane ends up going to see him at his studio, alone. Where he basically tells her that he’s not in love with his wife anymore, and hey, at least that didn’t happen to them, because it likely would have, people get old and bored with each other, god I’m French and cynical.

Dreadfulpenny: And they make wild passionate monkey love?

Diablevert: Not so much.

Dreadfulpenny: Damn. (I didn’t think so.)

Diablevert: Yeah. So what was your impression of this book?

Dreadfulpenny: A resounding meh. I actually found the beginning extremely readable (you compared it in an email to a young adult novel, and that’s pretty spot-on), but then it seemed like a poor quality Xerox of some other Pulitzer winner…. maybe Early Autumn?

Diablevert: Your unexpected affection for Early Autumn is a form of Stockholm syndrome.

Dreadfulpenny: At this point, it’s not so much affection for it as a striking similarity. (And I feel I’ve been beaten up for my rankings quite enough already.) I don’t really LOVE that book or anything, like I wouldn’t MARRY IT marry it…I just thought it was marginally better than some other ones.

Diablevert: Sorry, I didn’t mean to be a big meanie

Dreadfulpenny: No, it’s fair. But, there’s just no accounting for taste.

Seriously, though, look at the parallels: the American aristocratic family, the tension between the boring husband and the dashing lov-ah…Throw in a dash of So Big and you kind of have Years of Grace. It seems like the Pulitzer committee was getting pretty incestuous at this point, choosing books more for their similarities to previous winners than for their own individual merit.

Diablevert: I guess. I dunno, Years of Grace was just so mild. In So Big, Selena at least is taking some real risks, making some unconventional choices. You feel with her. And in Early Autumn, the man character comes close, at least, to breaking away.

Dreadfulpenny: Yes, Jane always makes the “correct” choice.

Diablevert: Exactly, so I think at some point, I was just like, nope. I don’t believe you, you’re never going to be stupid and impetuous. And so there’s nothing to root for, to bite your nails over.

Dreadfulpenny: Your life will be like an etiquette manual. It made it a hard book to get worked up over. It wasn’t BAD, per se (the prose was serviceable, the characters weren’t complete cardboard cutouts). I had hopes for the French boyfriend and the allure of college life. After that, it was hard to care any more.

Diablevert: So did I, and then when she gives those up without a whimper….I think it was the letter did me in.

Dreadfulpenny: The spiteful letter to Andre? Yeah, that was the worst.

Diablevert: I had a big soft spot for Andre. The relationship of his parents was the most idyllic in the book.

Dreadfulpenny: So true. He was pretty charming, with his smutty French books and courtship by set design.

Diablevert: And I was like, can you not see, girl? He will value you as a person and encourage and benefit from all your poetic sensibilities!

Dreadfulpenny: And you can ride bicycles built for two!

Diablevert: Right. And then he sends one letter, like “I still care for you deeply but I have this huge career opportunity and I can’t pass it up, but I still want to see you.” And she’s all, “What? You’re not willing to drop everything for love, right now? Fuck off, then! I’m-a marry this boring douchebag, he licks my boots! Plus he might die!”

And then…here’s the thing. If the marriage had changed her – this is the Anna Karenina set up, pretty much – if she’d done it and been like, “no. this is not enough for me,” if she could at least have been seriously tempted to chuck it all over, then I might have had some investment in the book. But instead even when that middle-aged bored patch crops up, you never think she’s really gonna ditch it all

Dreadfulpenny: Maybe that’s a fairly authentic response for a fit of pique though? I mean, it’s totally unsatisfactory from a narrative standpoint, but Jane was always fairly conventional and self-involved.

Diablevert: Oh, totally! That’s the thing, that’s why it’s so meh, as you said – it’s not like I don’t believe this. This all seems totally authentic and well-described and clear and sensible. It’s just like, yes, indeed, very realistic, but why should I want to read about it? You know? And part of me feels like that can’t be it, exactly. Because I think it should be possible to write about characters who lead ordinary lives and make it interesting.

Dreadfulpenny: I’m trying to think of a good example of that.

Diablevert: I really resist believing that there has to be soap opera, melodrama, for a story to work, like you have to have scandalous behavior in order to be interesting.

Dreadfulpenny: Well, the characters or narration could be super-witty, like in Austen? Or, y’know, there could be dragons or robots.

Diablevert: Heh. Or Zombies. But even Austen, now I think about it — I was actually re-reading her recently – she’s got a lot of scandal. Lydia elopes with a scoundrel she’s too dumb to see has no intention of marrying her, Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility turns mysteriously douchebag, there’s a secret engagement in that one, as well….

Dreadfulpenny: Not necessarily in a book like Persuasion (which is actually my favorite Austen).

Diablevert: That’s the one I haven’t read. Well, that and I mislaid my copy of Northanger Abby halfway through.

Dreadfulpenny: Persuasion is a pretty gentle book… minor scandal and misunderstandings, but essentially just about nice people. Anyway, I agree with you… but a richer internal life enlivens any book, and would have helped in Years of Grace. Otherwise, it’s just a James Herriot book without the animals, or a cozy cat mystery without the murder.

Diablevert: I guess. I dunno, I guess the thing I didn’t feel was lacking was internal life – Jane’s a very reflective character, and I felt like her observations could be quite subtle

Dreadfulpenny: Hmmm. I suppose. I guess her consistently conventional actions left me the impression that she was shallow.

Diablevert: well, what about her take on her friend’s mom, the chick who has the affair with the hot guy who later marries her mildly-skanky-only-in-a-Victorian-context friend?

Dreadfulpenny: Oh, you mean the lady who married Burt Lancaster (I couldn’t get over the name)?

Diablevert: Not the one who actually marries him, the chick who’s having the affair with him whom he ditches in order to get married, and then she kills herself.

Dreadfulpenny: Yep, the scandalous mom. I remember that she loved her and was protective towards her, but I thought that was more of a “ooh, shiny! pretty! free!” reaction.

Diablevert: I dunno – could you explain what you mean more by shiny, pretty, free?

Dreadfulpenny: I thought she had a bit of a childish infatuation with the mom… like preferring your friend’s prettier, more fun parents to your own dull ones. (Especially since Jane’s mom was so painfully correct.) And that she was in love with her brashness and freedom, but not in a way that she ever would have emulated.

Diablevert: Dido, in other words.

Dreadfulpenny: I suppose.

Diablevert: Well, I just mean that early on in the book she and Agnes have a couple conversations where they kind of moon over the romantic end of Dido… you’re saying you think her sympathy for the real woman is just as shallow and teenager-ish. I dunno, I was giving her more credit but weighing it in my mind I can easily see your interpretation.

Dreadfulpenny: I think the thing that makes me see Jane ultimately as shallow is the admission when she’s at Bryn Mawr that she could study and search for a job and push the boundaries of womanhood… or she could get married and let someone take care of her, because who really wants to work anyway?

Diablevert: Mmmm.

Dreadfulpenny: After that, I had a lot less patience for the character.

Diablevert: I see. Yeah, she does bail on that pretty easy-peasy. Although I don’t think that bothered me as much as you; she’s never portrayed as a woman of great ambition, just of moderate sensibility.

Dreadfulpenny: I just saw her both as a person who wanted to avoid any sort of conflict with another human being or someone who was a little on the lazy side. One of those traits I could empathize with, but both were too much for me. Again, I still think her views were totally in keeping with the time. I just vastly preferred Agnes.

Diablevert: Well, who wouldn’t? She’s portrayed as such a sad character, in a way.

Dreadfulpenny: Jane?

Diablevert: Agnes.

Dreadfulpenny: Agnes was a pretty tragic figure in the book…. she’s totally punished for her ambition and intelligence. Oh, and for being kinda plain and frazzled-looking all the time.

Diablevert: Her husband treats her mean.

Dreadfulpenny: I really felt like Barnes was trying to say to Agnes, “Well, dear, if you just conditioned your hair and used some toner, your husband wouldn’t have left you and you’d find a nice job as a typist.”

Diablevert: I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I’m not sure why

Dreadfulpenny: Well, I thought she was pretty beat-up on. I don’t remember Jane having much remorse about the affair, and it seemed that she always had a slightly condescending attitude towards Agnes.

Diablevert: Yeah, I can see that. Although I’d hardly call it and affair.

Dreadfulpenny: Didn’t they make out in the garden until dawn? Am I totally misremembering that?

Diablevert: that’s Early Autumn, dude.

Dreadfulpenny: Oh, wait, maybe they just held each other tenderly and talked about what it would be like to have an affair?

Diablevert: In this one he kisses her like, once and she gives him the boot.

Dreadfulpenny: Oh, yeah. Damn. Sorry. Anyway, no one got any, which has pretty much been the basic plot line since Age of Innocence (where at least there was all kinds of clutching in over heated rooms).

Diablevert: Stupid fucking “wholesome” requirement

Dreadfulpenny: I mean, I don’t need there to be hot action in every book I read… but once in a decade would be nice. It is part of the human condition after all. Anyway… my mind is clearly degenerating.

Diablevert: Did you have anything else in your notes about this one? Lesbians? Horse farms? Exaggerated parallelisms? Actually, on that last point – I do find it a bit weird how she goes to the trouble of setting up each of Jane’s kids as a near-perfect foil for one of the older generation, and has them make different choice…which then pretty much work out okay for them.

Dreadfulpenny: I probably can’t comment on that since I didn’t read the end. In fact, by the point where I stopped, I had trouble keeping the kids straight. All I remember is the icky feeling that they were somehow all marrying cousins.

Diablevert: That makes sense. Anything else bug you about it?

Dreadfulpenny: Nah. It was a pretty blah book. Not painful to read, but not meritorious either.

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Years of Grace: Sane, Good, and a Virtuous Influence on Her Acquaintances

Posted in Margaret Ayer Barnes, The Age of Innocence, Years of Grace on December 1, 2009 by Diablevert

Romantic comedies: Cliches. Ridden with them. Can’t seem to be made without them, it’s built into the DNA. For instance, the heroine’s always hooked up with this straight-laced guy who seems perfect on the surface, but she is secretly or not so secretly tempted by the exasperating, charming, cute slacker hero, and eventually Mr. Straight Arrow reveals himself to be a twerp in some fashion and she runs off with the unsuitable sensitive boy, who may not have a steady paycheck but does possess a heart full of love, etc. That’s nearly always the set up: Cary Grant v. Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. Ben Stiller v. Ethan Hawke in Singles. Mikahil Barishnikov v. Mr. Big in Sex and the City. Etc. I could go on, you could go on. The movie industry has certainly gone on and on and on. Maybe I’m being unfair; maybe it’s just the rules of the road for romance, period, the tragic as well as the humorous: Tristan and Isolde. Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina.

Have you ever longed to see a version in which the heroine sensibly sticks with her solid Straight Arrow, where she regretfully doesn’t cheat on her husband but gently shows her potential lover the door, virtue intact, where late in life she absolutely does not get a wild hair and lit off for the territories, an equally gray old roué by her finally-liberated side?

Yeah, me neither.

Yet that, dear readers, is precisely what Years of Grace is the story of. A sensible woman acting sensibly. A woman who looks into the face of her deepest temptation and says, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly hurt my family like that.” Who comes to value companionship, steadiness and probity over passion.

Possibly someone could make an interesting book out of this. But Barnes gave it a hell of a go — Jane is prone to sympathy, capable of subtlety — and she just doesn’t bring it off. For me it was the letter from Andre — when Jane rejects it so soundly, deciding that their feelings were only puppy love after all, I realized that we were dealing with a woman who would never stray. And so there is no tension to her temptations.

It’s interesting to compare this with the Age of Innocence. That was another book where if you’d grabbed my arm as I was about to flip the first page and asked me to give my best guess as to its plot and its outcome, I think I could have come fairly close. Given a bare familiarity with its characters and setting, Newland’s cowardice was always a safe bet. But you don’t feel safe reading Wharton. You feel tortured, tempted, twisted, agonized, just as the characters do. You will then to be better than their natures—for that’s another important difference between Barnes and Wharton, Wharton clearly sees Newland’s cowardice as cowardice. Or at least, she sees his limits as limits, flaws that will forever bar him from true happiness. Whereas Barnes seems to see Jane’s compromises as acceptable, admirable; the passions she rejects flawed, the comforts she clings to a worthy reward. Let’s not forget the title, after all.

Yet in setting up the comparison of Jane’s choices with those of her children — who do seek personal happiness and fulfillment, even at the risk of estrangement from their family and class — Barnes leaves the ultimate outcome of those choices somewhat ambiguous. The kids seem happy for now, but Jane frets over whether they’ll stay that way, and the book doesn’t seem to offer a solid hint. Instead, she seems interested in spotlighting these differences mostly as illustrations of the changing tenor of the times. Jane, child of the 1890s, lives by one code; her flapper kids another. Barnes seems softhearted and nostalgic about Jane’s Victorian era, but does not quite condemn modern mores (particularly as they relate to her Jane’s younger kids, of which more anon). As a reader, I certainly wasn’t longing for a Sinclair Lewis-style broadside against the sclerosis of the upper classes, but Barnes’ periwinkle-to-dove moral spectrum leaves the book a muddle, with nothing much either to root for or to mourn. I admit I found myself skimming in the later sections, just to get the thing dusted, as I’d no longer any stake in learning the outcome. (Yes, she does see Andre one more time. No, it’s not worth waiting for.)

This is not to say that Barnes ever lost me, suspension-of-disbelief-wise; I bought Years, and Jane, till the end. I just wasn’t invested in her. This dishwater rinse of realism seems to be something we’ll seeing a lot of in the ’30s — no wonder Gone With the Wind was so popular.

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Years of Grace: Summary

Posted in Margaret Ayer Barnes, Years of Grace with tags , , , , on November 23, 2009 by Diablevert

A quick and dirty summary of this one, I think, so’s I don’t clog up my beautiful rant about what I thought of the book.

Years of Grace is about a young woman, Jane Ward, growing up in late-Victorian Chicago. Not a couple of words you see often paired, Victorian and Chicago, but trust me, here they fit. Jane comes from a well-to-do family; her soft-hearted father and prim mother both keep close tabs on her, and she’s allowed all the freedoms a respectable teenage girl would have had in the 1890s, which is to say, none. (She has a mild freak out when she finds herself on such wildly bohemian sprees as hanging out with two friends, one of them a boy, and cooking supper for themselves without any adult supervision, in the middle of the afternoon, at the age of 16.)

Said boy is named Andre; he has a bit better claim to bohemianism, being the son of a French civil servant with aspirations of becoming a sculptor. Jane, naturellement, falls in love with him. He does the honorable thing and—before they get past several longing looks and a smooch or two—goes to her father to ask for her hand. Jane’s mother hits the roof, goes right on through, and is last seen sailing over Lake Michigan, and even her doting father puts his grim face on. They lay down the law: Cease all contact for the next four years, and if by then you two crazy kids still keep in your breasts the eternal flame (at the ripe old ages of 21 and 23, respectively) well, then we’ll see.

Faced with the choice of eloping with her lover or being entirely cut off from him for the next four years….Jane basically never considers eloping with her lover and meekly accepts being cut off from him for the next four years. They part tearfully, and Jane grows a smallish pair and forces her mother to let her attend Bryn Mawr, in order to get out of the house and further her intellectual development, in that order.

Jane loves Brynn Mawr, flitting though some of her classes but digging up on poetry and history and generally being all stimulated and whatnot. She also enjoys rooming with one of her best friends from back home, Agnes, a whip-smart but regrettably plain girl who comes from a much poorer family than Jane’s. But at the close of her second year at college, Jane’s older sister gets married and moves out of the house. Jane’s mother, lonely and anxious that Jane should make her debut and hook up with a young man of the non-French, non-artistic, non-starving kind, asks her not to go back for her third. And Jane agrees.

After several months at home, Jane meets a young fellow named Stephen, from an old Boston family, newly arrived in Chicago to be trained up as a banker. Stephen’s making calf-eyes at her almost immediately, but Jane stiff-arms him for months as she waits for her 21st birthday to roll around, as she’s still carrying a torch for Andre. The pressure’s getting pretty intense for her to get hitched, however, as the Spanish-American War has broken out and Stephen’s signed up with the Rough Riders, and is pulling the ol’ faithful, “Perhaps, if I live,” routine. Her faith is not proved foolish however, as shortly after her birthday, a letter indeed arrives from her old flame.

It contents are less pleasing than its existence. Andre writes that he’s a bit nervous and ambivalent, as he not sure she still cares for him, but he would very much like to see her. But his sculpting career is actually going quite well at the moment, and he’s just been awarded a prestigious prize which comes along with a fellowship. He plans to accept, and as a result, he may not be able to get to America for many months. Kthxbai.

Jane, who’s left a doleful Stephen at the bottom of the stairs in his doughboy uniform in order to read the letter, throws a hissy. Basically, she’d been carrying this romantic ideal in her head that Andre’d drop everything for her, and when he choose his work over their reunion she decided upon the instant that she’s been a fool, and writes back a sniffy letter telling him don’t bother thanks, she’s going to marry Stephen instead.

And so she does. She then had three kids, two girls and a boy, and for the next fifteen years or so leads the quiet life of the wealthy wife of a staid banker. Stifled and bored, something finally comes along to break up the monotony: On a visit to her old friend Anges, now living in New York, Jane meets Agnes’s husband, Jimmy Trent, a n’er-do-well composer/critic who just happens to be planning an extended stay in Chicago to take a temporary post as a reviewer for a big paper there.

After a prolonged tête-à-tête on the train back, Jane begins to feel a little fluttery over Jimmy, and he mounts an earnest campaign for her heart and/or pants. He’s over the house all the time, charms the kids, hell, he even gets along with her husband. When he finally makes his pass, however, Jane gives him the boot immediately, horrified at the idea of disgracing her family. He mopes off to Europe (abandoning Agnes, and his daughter) and eventually ends up drafted into the German army and killed at the front early in WWI. Jane sheds a few tears and forgets ‘im.

That brief spark of romance is the last she is to have; while Jane remains our protagonist, the action now shifts to the younger generation, Jane’s kids and their cousins and friends, seen through Jane’s eyes. Her eldest daughter marries her first cousin, another young soldier about to be posted to the front. A few years go by, she has a few kids, and here things begin to take a turn.

A series of deliberate parallels are set up between Jane’s generation and that of her children, with her eldest daughter standing in for her, and her younger kids mimicking the lives of their aunt and uncle, Stephen’s sibling. Except when Jane’s daughter grows bored with her marriage and falls for a new man, she decides to chuck it all, divorce her husband, move to Europe and marry the new guy. And when her other two kids unexpectedly come into an inheritance, they seize their chance to break free of Jane and her set, with the son, rather Niles Crane-ishly, buying a town house on Beacon Hill and getting into antiquing while her daughter buys a farm, starting a dog-breeding business together with a “friend” with whom she also shares a pied-a-terre in the city where they can entertain their musical theater friends. While wearing bobbed hair and men’s silk pajamas.

Jane frets about all of these developments. She’s disappointed in her son’s decision to move away, confounded by her younger daughter’s smart set friends, and disappointed and ashamed of her eldest daughter’s decision to divorce. And though she knows it’s her and not them who are out of temper with the times, she worries that none of them will end up happy. As she has, pretty much, with Stephen. Bored, but happy.

Her acceptance of her fate and approval of her own decision is sealed by a reunion with Andre in the book’s final pages, when she travels to Paris to witness her daughter’s second marriage. For Andre, though he remembers her fondly, has grown old and cynical during his own unhappy marriage to a younger woman, and tells her ruefully that maybe it was better that they never got together, since they’d inevitably have wearied of each other. Jane takes his assessment as confirmation that she was right to write him off years ago, and rides back to Stephen, comforted, conventional, and safe as she was when she started the book.

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Age of Innocence Alternates, and a Thank You

Posted in Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence on November 10, 2009 by Diablevert

It’s been lonely, this wending our way through the wilds of the Pulitzer cannon, but things have been looking up a bit lately we’ve been joined on our pilgrimage by fellow bloggers, such as the estimable JW Rosenzweig of Following Pulitzer. (He had some kind words for us, too.) It’s been great fun to read along as someone else suffers throughenjoys some of these rare early winners.

But it was a recent post of his on a better known Pulitzer book, the classic Age of Innocence, that prompted me to post today. Rosenzweig writes that in Edith Wharton’s paper were notes on alternate endings for the Age of Innocence, with two possibilities mentioned — 1) Newland and May break it off, and he marries the Countess, but they grow apart and eventually seperate as she longs for the freedoms of Europe and he’s too stuck in New York society to ever live abroad, and 2) Newland marries May but eventually decides he can’t bear to be without the Countess, runs of to Florida with her for a desperate fling, but he comes to regret his rash action and the Countess comes to realize how boring he is, and again they go their seperate ways.

These alternate ending struck me as really interesting — playing them out in my mind gave me a better sense of how Wharton imagined these characters. Reading the Age that we have, one is left feeling that Newland’s great flaw is cowardice, that he won’t risk his and his family’s reputation even for his one shot at love. But in Wharton’s alternate versions, Newland risks, but ends up unhappy anyway, because love or no love, he’s still the same Newland, product of the same airless Society, still overridden with their concerns, still holding their values — in a word, boring, even as a giddy adulterer, a lover on the run.

And that makes sense to me. It suggests that Wharton considered his failure to bust out of the trap a symptom of his essential flaw, and not its essence, and in a way it makes the ending she went with the happiest possible, for it allows both Newland and the Countess the illusion that but for outside constraints they might have found in each other perfect comity. It reminds me of the character of Stephen in Years of Grace (of which more soon). He is happier than Newland, because he’s less sensitive, less perceptive, less full of yearning. But other than that they’re the same guy, content to spend summer vacation at the same resort they went to with their parents when they were kids, entering the same damn boat race every August. Because their essential question about any activity is “would stopping this tradition disappoint others?” not “do I enjoy doing this?” Contrast that attitude with that of the Countess, whose very entrance into the novel is a declaration that she cares far more for her own happiness than society’s censure, and that she’s willing to risk poverty and ridicule and scandal to obtain art, conversation, and most of all freedom. Newland and the Countess love the same things—and each other—but they value them quite differently, and I think Wharton’s probably right that that difference would always have been an obstacle between them, no matter what form their relationship took if they’d continued it.

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Ratings in Review

Posted in Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Ernest Poole, Historical Context, Julia Peterkin, Louis Bromfield, Margaret Wilson, Oliver LaFarge, Pulitzer Winners, Sinclair Lewis, The Scorecard, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather on November 9, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

After some delay, here are my rankings:

1. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
2. The Age of Innocence
3. So Big
4. Early Autumn
5. Scarlet Sister Mary
6. One of Ours
7. Arrowsmith
8. The Magnificent Ambersons
9. Alice Adams
10. The Able McLaughlins
11. His Family

Some strong similaries between Diablevert’s rankings and mine, some minor shifting of one book slightly above another, and a large difference of opinion on Bromfield and Cather. (Well, this particular Cather. My Antonia is one of my favorite books. One of Ours, not so much.) I agree with d.v.’s assessment of the post-frontier theme (and why is it that she always manages to put things so eloquently and then I come in and bat clean-up? The perils of having an awesome co-blogger… and yes, I am sucking up since my rankings are mucho belated.)

Anyhoo, this is mostly a matter of taste here: The Age of Innocence is pretty clearly a better book, more layered and masterfully written, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey had a magical clarity about it, that oracular quality that good speculative fiction has, that made me really love it. Both were books I might not have picked up and I’m truly grateful to have read. So Big is uneven at best, but there was enough humor and charm to keep me genuinely engaged, and Selina still stands in my mind months later as an engaging character.

I think I’m giving Bromfield more credit than diablevert because I went on to read The Green Bay Tree and A Good Woman. Not that I think any of those individual books is particularly good, but the three together present Bromfield’s project pretty well: the degradation of proper New England families to industrialization and the rabble. Then it’s pretty much a race to the bottom: Scarlet Sister Mary is interesting but paternalistic, One of Ours is too emo, Arrowsmith is too long with too much science talk, Booth Tarkington is condescending in both of his winning novels, The Able McLaughlins is just plain bad, and His Family was even worse. Sprinkle a hearty dash of sexism over the lot and you just about have the final six.

I do think the Pulitzers are improving in general, if they have a tendency to memorialize the patrician, the schlocky bestseller, and the schmoopy. The 1930s bring us a bunch of books that neither of us have heard of (and may not even be physically available to us… I think we irreparably damaged the already-tattered sole surviving copy of Years of Grace in any of the NYC public library systems). But we do have Gone with the Wind, The Yearling, and The Grapes of Wrath to look forward to… oh, and The Good Earth. *le sigh*

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Laughing Boy: A Chat

Posted in Laughing Boy, Oliver LaFarge, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather on October 9, 2009 by Diablevert

Diablevert: When you get a chance check this link out. I was struck by the passage about Momaday (the three paragraphs or so starting with “the absorption of fiction,” excerpt here). I was interested in that bit as a launching off point for Laughing Boy

Dreadful Penny: “authenticity is a snark”… damn. I feel like I’d really have to read this to absorb it.

Diablevert: Don’t feel you have to read the whole thing (most of the article is about creative writing programs qua creative writing programs). But I thought it was interesting that Menard points out that Momaday was criticized for writing modernist Indians. And I thought that was especially striking because here’s La Farge writing modernist Indians, three decades previous.

Do you any of think the other Pulitzers were modernist?

Dreadful Penny: I don’t think that any of the Pulitzers we’ve read to date have been particularly modernist until Laughing Boy. Maybe One of Ours was, in that Cather’s style is fairly internal.

Diablevert: Bit odd, isn’t it? That the anthropologically-based one set on a Navajo reservation in 1915 should be he most stream of conscious-y, with the old “the angst of modernity overwhelms and tortures me” bit, eh?

Or maybe not odd….Laughing Boy is centered around a conflict between old and new ways

Dreadful Penny: The Bridge of San Luis Rey isn’t really modernist, but it does feel the most contemporary in style out of all of them. I think you’re onto something there.

Diablevert: I guess, but if I were to play Devil’s advocate I’d say that’s because nouveau-fabulist is a recent fashion

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know that I would call it fabulist… no early fantasy or science fiction that I know of reads like that.

Diablevert: Fabulist like, Aesop’s fables. Like the Grimm Brothers.

Dreadful Penny: It’s more like Borges than George MacDonald or H.G. Wells or anything like that. I think that’s conflating content with style slightly. Fables don’t have that level of specificity and attention to place… they can’t, or they don’t function particularly well as fables. Anyway…. Bridge isn’t modernist, either, but Laughing Boy certainly seems to be.

Diablevert: Sure. But there’s still and aspect to that style…a kind of dreamy far-awayness where every character is less person than archetype. Everything is mythic and monumental, that’s what enables strange or fantastic things to happen and pass unremarked on in the story-–like Garcia Marquez’s characters living to be 100-bajillion or whatever it was in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… Bridge could have been written by Borges or Marquez, I think, and it would pass completely for their other writing.

Diablevert: Whereas Laughing Boy is deliberately, stiltedly simplified, but Laughing Boy and Slim Girl are modern people underneath the mythic language. La Farge follows the petty streams of thought, more like a modernist than a fable writer.

Dreadful Penny: Exactly. It’s the first Pulitzer that I think deploys stream-of-consciousness with any regularity or success.

Diablevert: Mmmm. So does that make it late or just in time? Cather probably comes closest otherwise – there’s a lot of time spent in Claude’s head – but there’s still the old structure, the hand of the author, visibly holding everything together.

So discounting Cather, is 1930 late for a major book to show modernist influences?

Dreadful Penny: Well, the major modernists were writing only slightly earlier in Europe, right? Joyce and Woolf notably…But we haven’t hit the high modernism of Faulkner chronologically, right?

Diablevert: Contemporary, almost. A little earlier. I forget exactly when the saga of Ulysses’ ban took place, but it’s a little before or right around this time. Of course, the hip heads had been reading excerpts for ages. And Portrait was out

Dreadful Penny: Strike that… Sound and the Fury came out in 1929, followed by As I Lay Dying in 1930. Oh, man, that makes the Pulitzer committee look like schmucks for picking this book.

Diablevert: Well, they look like schmucks a lot of the time anyway

Dreadful Penny: Good call… so I’d say this is nearer the leading edge of American modernism than European, anyway… so La Farge might not be super-behind-the-times for this side of the pond. It might be, perhaps, unfair to compare the poor guy to Faulkner.

Diablevert: Yeah, Pulitzer felt guilty over it, too…

Dreadful Penny: I think this passage from the link you sent is most relevant here: “And though some readers are devoted to fiction about ethnic minorities because it tells “their story,” there is a degree to which such literature is for outsiders, a variety of anthropology in which natives “inform” on their own cultures to literary tourists. The rest of the natives are often not thrilled to find their practices paraded before the gaze of outsiders.”

Diablevert: Word.

Dreadful Penny: So Laughing Boy is an anthropological study written by an outsider in a new-wave European literary style?

Diablevert: I think you could say that. It reminds me of the brief reminiscence I linked to from Tony Hillerman they other day. He talked about how he knew these two New Mexican writers who had this wider reputation, and how one loved the land and one–La Farge–the people. It was a matter of interest as much as style; the landscape was just a pile of trees and rocks, the inside of people’s heads, he cared about deeply.

Dreadful Penny: That’s a great observation… the landscape writing in Laughing Boy seems perfunctory to me, but the characters are very carefully drawn.

Also, this isn’t a book with a great supporting cast. It’s like he only had room (or scope) to get into two people’s heads.

Diablevert: but I guess what gets me is, is that right? Even in La Farge’s book he acknowledges that the Indian way of metaphor is very different from a white man’s when he talks about poetry and song. So does a modernist rendering of their inner lives make sense? Is modernism a “truer” representation of a universal human experience of thought, or is it just a filter, a flavor?

Dreadful Penny: I feel like modernism is a pretty accurate representation of the average state of mind, or maybe just my state of mind most days. But I couldn’t quote you chapter on verse about whether or not that’s a widely held critical opinion.

Diablevert: I dunno, do you think the book is successful in its attempt at Indianess?

Dreadful Penny: That I don’t know if I can say.

Diablevert: Fair enough.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know enough about “Indianness” or the Navajo or any of these cultures to judge La Farge’s authenticity here. What do you think?
(I mean, I think Sherman Alexie is a great representation of “Indianess,” but maybe that’s because I love his style and HIS sense of his own culture, not that it’s an accurate representation of anything.)

Diablevert: I’m not sure. I think the book is criticized for not being authentic.

Dreadful Penny: To be honest, I just can’t imagine that it is authentic, just because of the circumstances of its creation. That a first-time novelist from outside a culture would be able to capture it with any sense of authenticity seems like trapping lightning in a bottle.

Diablevert: It’s funny, I just came across an article in my background googling that appears to be making the argument that Momaday isn’t authentic with his Pulitzer Prize–winner, because he’s Kiowa and the characters are Navajo or something. But I’m afraid to read it so I don’t ruin the book before I come to it.

That’s a bit of what Menard is getting to in his aside in the writing workshops article – to an extent, is it not the case that any attempt to “make literary” such a experiment has an inauthenticity?

Dreadful Penny: I don’t believe that you need to be of a certain ethnicity to write about that ethnicity, but I do think it’s an enterprise that should be undertaken with great care. But, essentially, folks is folks.

Diablevert: Sure. But how do you know if you did it right?

Dreadful Penny: If you don’t get strung up by the public and lambasted by critics?

Diablevert: Gotcha.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t think Laughing Boy is a great work of art, but I don’t think it’s an ill-intentioned one, and all I have to base that judgment on is the quality of his prose and his characterization, and how it resonates with my sense of human experience and my personal boundaries of how one should approach another culture (which are themselves, of course, culturally constructed).

Diablevert: Yeah, I’d agree with that. I did like the scene in the trading post where all the Indians just dick with the newbie. That felt authentic, and that guy, the shop owner, felt like–-of course that guy would have existed, but I just hadn’t imagined him before. The guy who goes out west thinking he’ll put one over on the dumb Indians.

Dreadful Penny: That felt authentic to me, too… maybe humor adds to a sense of authenticity? Like, for a joke to be good, it needs to be plausible? (That would be a decidedly unliterary way to ascertain authenticity… is it funny?)

Diablevert: Might still be a good way, though. Anything else bugging you about Laughing Boy?

Dreadful Penny: We’ve already come up with much more than I ever thought I would have to say about Laughing Boy. You?

Diablevert: Nah, I’m good

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Rankings in Review

Posted in Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Ernest Poole, Historical Context, Julia Peterkin, Louis Bromfield, Margaret Wilson, Oliver LaFarge, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather on October 3, 2009 by Diablevert

So we finally finished our first decade, and it seemed like a good time to take a quick look back and start an argument with my co-blogger by making sweeping statements about which books were best. Here’s my list:

1. Age of Innocence
2. Bridge of San Luis Rey
3. One of Ours
4. So Big
5. Scarlet Sister Mary
6. Magnificant Ambersons
7. Alice Adams
8. Arrowsmith
9. Early Autumn
10. His Family
11. Able McLaughlins

I think I may be going soft. Looking back at this first decade of the Pulitzers, I am struck by the virtues of the first batch of books that we’ve idly slogged though, even though at the time I whinged again and again about their flaws.

Succumbing — as we all must sometimes — to my inner Nick Hornby, I found I met in the middle while making my rankings.

Age of Innocence deserves its reputation as a classic, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey’s contemporary reputation could use a little dusting and buffing; I enjoyed both those books thoroughly. And while the plots of each had their flaws, both One of Ours and So Big had passages of quite fine writing (though I’d hand the laurel clearly to Cather over Ferber).

Meanwhile, down the other end of the scale The Able McLaughlins was plumb terrible, elevated, I must imagine, more for its wholesomely exotic frontier setting that for it style or its story, while His Family was frequently, leadenly awkward and Louis Bromfield hadn’t ever met a subtext he didn’t feel like explicating at tedious length.

The middle patch — Ambersons and Alice Adams and Arrowsmith — were more dull and irritating than bad, exactly; united in their snobbishness. And Scarlet Sister Mary is the odd duck; parts of it were charming, but the thorough racism of the whole text always left a sour taste beneath the sweet idyll of its island setting.

Looking at the books as a group, I’m also struck by how large a theme the Frontier is. The high prairie turns up as a literal setting in One of Ours, So Big, Arrowsmith, and Able McLaughlins. But many of the other books describe people pushing at the boundaries in other ways: Alice Adams and Ambersons describe the transformation of a small town into a big city. More metaphorically, His Family, Early Autumn, and Scarlet Sister Mary all share characters who rebel against sexual constraint, and try and strike out new roles for themselves, while Arrowsmith charts a doctor pushing the envelope of his field. Again and again, we find characters trying to cope with a world transformed from the one they knew in youth, to seize the new opportunities opened to them thereby, and not get stuck and crushed by the past.

Actually, after a memory-refreshing google and and a little bit more thought, I don’t know that Frontier is quite the word I want. Post-frontierism might be better, if that were a real word. These books aren’t really all that interested in cowboys and Indians and Conestoga wagons, about conquering the wilderness. They’re more interested in what happens when we’ve finally hit the end of the road. Picture a tired pioneer on a bluff over the Pacific, in that moment after the journey’s end, when, having drunk in its blue vastness at last, with the tang of the salt still in her nose, and the ocean breeze whipping her hair, she turns around to look back over how far she’s come, searching the land with troubled eyes: What is this place we have created? Does it have room in it for dreamers? For love? Who are these new people who have scrambled to fill the empty spaces? What has the scrambling made of them? For what do they scramble still?

Maybe it’s an odd thing that the books I like best and frankly think were best were the ones which don’t share this sense of tackling a new world of new mores; the Age of Innocence is set thirty or forty years before it was published, while Bridge is set in a half-fantasy world a continent and two centuries apart from the 1920s. Perhaps the seeming oddness explains itself: Only very fine writing could have put these books at the head of the pack when the judges were so otherwise swayed by the attempt to take on contemporary social concerns.

It looks like we might be getting a wider picture of the world in the decade to come, what with books set in China, on a Navajoh reservation, in Civil War Atlanta, and among the migrant workers of California. But after the first batch, I’m cultivating a sneaky hope that some of them won’t fit in at all, and will have bashed their way onto the list in all their frivolity on pure style alone…I think I may be turning into Oscar Wilde. Bit of a terrifying prospect, but maybe I’ll get to shag Jude Law.

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Laughing Boy and “Laughing Man”?

Posted in Laughing Boy, Oliver LaFarge with tags , , , , , , on September 9, 2009 by Diablevert

As we get closer to the present I think we’re gonna find more flickering traces of these books, even the ones that are themselves not as well known today. For instance, Laughing Boy and La Farge generally has been cited as an influence on J.D. Salinger; I found an interesting old post on a Salinger discussion board that argues that Salinger’s story “The Laughing Man” was influenced by and parallels La Farge’s novel.

The Laughing Man—which is excellent, and you should follow the link and read it if you haven’t—concerns a group of boys who are picked up after school and ferried about by a young college student, to play baseball in the park and so forth. The boys call themselves Comanches, and their leader, The Chief; in foul weather when they can’t go outside and play The Chief often passes the time by telling them stories of “The Laughing Man” a disfigured half-Chinese international thief and spy. The Comanche’s afterschool idyll is broken up when a woman, Mary Hudson, starts dating the chief and accompanies the lads on some of their outings.

I won’t say too much more so I don’t ruin Salinger’s story for you, but I’ll say that I think that ancient forum poster may have something when he says this:

The Navajo/American conflict is key to LAUGHING BOY. It’s a love story – for sure – but the major stumbling block to Laughing Boy (LB) and Slim Girl (SG) are their cultures and transforming between them. Slim Girl sees Laughing Boy as “a light with which to see her way back to her people, to the good things of her people.” (58) However, she isn’t truly sincere in returning to all the ways — she doesn’t want to herd sheep or grow old and ugly — plus she’s sleeping with another man. Likewise, Laughing Boy becomes enthralled by parts of the American culture (like whiskey): “She observed to herself that this man, who was to bind her to The People, seemed to be driving her yet farther apart from them.” (140) Eventually Laughing Boy renounces the American ways (crushes a bottle of Whiskey) and then finds out about SG’s adultery. She also renounces American ways…and they ride off into the sunset. Slim Girl’s tragic death is difficult for Laughing Boy to accept but – unlike the Laughing Man – he eventually makes it through.

Salinger translates the Navajo/American conflict in LAUGHING BOY to the Salinger-esque clash between the ‘nice’ and ‘phony’ worlds (as French simplifies it in his review of Salinger’s works). Just as Laughing Boy represented the Navajo lifestyle, John Gedsudski represents the authentic, the true. [Another poster] noted that the Navajo lifestyle is similar to Eastern religions — perhaps Salinger presents Gedsudski as an unwitting characterization of the Eastern philosophies. Further, most Salinger characters that can relate to and understand children are always the special, rare, ‘nice’ ones. Similarly, Mary Hudson is obviously represented by Slim Girl in LAUGHING BOY. They’re both gorgeous. They are both educated. They are both rich. Slim Girl must change to Laughing Boy’s Navajo lifestyle, Mary must change to John’s lower class life.

The poster goes on to try and draw a number of other parallels between the story within the story of The Laughing Man and the novel Laughing Boy. If you ask me I’d say his thread breaks here, as a lot of the Chinese opium den, wily Parisian nemesis stuff that marks the Laughing Man’s milieu has a much clearer source in the movie and radio serials of Salinger’s boyhood than it does in La Farge’s novel: a Dante-esque one-for-one allegory the story is not. But it was an interesting take, and interesting to see a bit of evidence on how La Farge might have influenced other writers. (Tony Hillerman, the detective novelist who set his series in New Mexico with Navajo detectives, knew La Farge in person and had some interesting things to say about his also.)

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Laughing Boy: Summary

Posted in Laughing Boy, Oliver LaFarge on September 4, 2009 by Dreadful Penny

Laughing Boy. Oliver LaFarge. 1930 winner. The Pulitzer committee brings us back-to-back anthropological-ish studies of groups of marginalized Americans, in this case, the Navajo. Where Scarlet Sister Mary is lush, Laughing Boy is clean and spare, but both are far more modernist in style than preceding winners.

The plot of Laughing Boy is extremely straightforward: boy sees girl from afar, wants to marry her, his family objects, they get married anyway, they live together, conflicts ensue, she cheats, she dies, he moves on. All of this plays out across the cultural conflict of Navajo that live largely apart from white men and Navajo that were forced to assimilate in white schools and towns. We see inside Navajo horse races, dances, hogahns, and the hybrid home that Laughing Boy and Slim Girl make together that is truly part of neither world.

The book starts with a dance and the constellation of social activities that surrounds it: trading, visiting relatives, horse racing. Laughing Horse is a young silversmith and keeper of horses who becomes intrigued with Slim Girl, a slightly older woman who seems at the fringe of the gathering. He finds her more forward than other Navajo women of his experience and they agree to marry without the permission of their families and despite his uncle’s open misgivings about her virtue. They travel to the outskirts of Los Palos, a white settlement, where Slim Girl visits her white lover and makes arrangements to see him, setting up the double life that entangles her for the rest of the book. She introduces Laughing Boy to liquor and persuades him to build up wealth with her before they think of rejoining his family at T’o Tlakai. Meanwhile, she struggles with the traditional roles of a Navajo wife, most notably learning how to weave.

The couple takes a trip to a Night Chant in the middle of the book, giving Laughing Boy an opportunity to defend the “Indian-ness” of his wife and their way of life to his family. While she is heartened by this, upon their return home Laughing Boy’s doubts fester, sending him away from the home more often and questioning her decision to delay having children until they are wealthier. This balance is lost when he discovers Slim Girl with her love by chance and shoots them both with arrows, wounding his wife in the arm. Chastened, Slim Girl finally reveals her full history to her husband: her pregnancy, abortion, and subsequent life of prostitution before she met the man who brought her to Chiziai. They feel cleansed by this revelation, and Slim Girl finally agrees to join him at T’o Tlakai and live fully as a Navajo wife. This is tragically interrupted when an old rival for Slim Girl comes upon them in their travels and kills her in a fit of jealousy. Laughing Boy conducts a modified version of traditional funeral rites for her, keeping a four-day vigil over her body alone and then rejoining his people.

This story’s told through a lot of interior narration from Laughing Boy and Slim Girl and asides about white/Navajo interactions and the tension between the Navajo and other tribes. We get to learn a bunch about silversmithing and horse-trading and weaving and traditional dances and funeral customs and drinking and scamming white guys out of money and canned goods. It’s a little odd that all of a sudden the Pulitzer committee realized that there are non-white people out there in America and gave us Scarlet Sister Mary and Laughing Boy back to back, but I’m grateful for even this small stretch towards diversity. Too bad we’re going to have to wait a good long while for a book that’s actually by someone who’s not white… 1969, I think? N.

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The Scorecard: 1930-1939

Posted in The Scorecard on August 18, 2009 by Diablevert

I made a post, quite some time ago now, giving a rough scorecard of our knowledge of the books before we’d encountered them for this project, on the philosophy that, if we’re going to have the temerity to critique these fine authors, you ought to be acquainted with our level of expertise going into the thing. Well, a mere year and half later we’re done with this first decade, and so it seemed like an appropriate time for an update, as we launch ourselves into the ’30s. To recap:

Standards :

Heard of: Books: Have we heard of this book before?

Authors: Could we answer the question, “Who is X?”

Read: If we’ve heard of them, have we in fact read any of the books in question?

Love: Of the one’s we’ve read, did we love any?

Loathe: Did we loathe any?

Movie: And lastly, although this in no way counts toward the Books Read tally, did we see the movie version?

Books and Authors DV: Book DV: Author DP: Book DP: Author
1930 Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge No No No
 No
1931 Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes No No No No
1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck Yes Yes Yes Yes
1933 The Store by T. S. Stribling No No No No
1934 Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller No No No No
1935 Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson No No No No
1936 Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis No No No No
1937 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Yes Yes Yes Yes
1938 The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand No No No No
1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Yes Yes Yes Yes

Diablevert :

Heard of: : 3 Books, 3 Authors

Read: 0

Movie: Once while folding laundry I stumbled onto a showing of Gone with the Wind right after the bit where Scarlett’s like, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers…” whilst standing silhouetted against the ruins of Tara. I thought to myself, ah, this must be near the end, I’ll just stick around and catch the last half hour. Two and a half hours later….

Comment: I am ashamed to discover that I am actually worse on this decade than the last. I am also lightly touched with trepidation as of the three books I have heard of, two are ones that I specifically remember wiggling out of reading as a kid. Every kid in the fourth grade class ahead of mine hated The Good Earth so much they had us read something different, and I recall The Yearling as a long book about the deer. I never did go through that horse phase all little girls are supposed to endure about age 9; I think too many well-meaning suggestions about Black Beauty may have put me off the whole boy-and-his-dog genre. I guess we’ll see if my distaste has lingered for a lifetime. Maybe I’m a bigger softy now.

Dreadful Penny :

Heard of: 3 Books, 3 Authors

Read: 2

Love/Loathe: I was assigned The Good Earth in high school, and being a good little girl, completed said reading. I do not have fond memories. Don’t even get me started on having to read Gone with the Wind again… this, much like my second go on The Magnificent Ambersons, may well prove to be my Pulitzer Waterloo. I wouldn’t say I loathe either book, but, as they say in Spaceballs, I thought we’d met again for the first time for the last time.

Movie: Seen Gone with the Wind twice, once in 5th grade (I remember it taking nearly a month to watch, but that can’t be right) and again when I first got Netflix and thought I should fill my queue with classic movies before I gave in and loaded that shit up with Battlestar Galactica episodes and Robert Downey Jr. movies.

Comment: *sigh* I really don’t want to enter the ’30s with trepidation, and yet… it just doesn’t look like this will be the shining decade of Pulitzer choices. But I can say that I’m actually looking forward to The Yearling, as it seems like a classic of kiddie lit that I’d never read otherwise (and, while I also hated horse books as a kid, and am still slightly creeped out by horses to this day, I had a special fondness at the time for “dead dog” books. So I’m ready for the one where *spoiler alert* the deer bites it.)

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