His Family: Summary
So, a summary of His Family.
And so we begin. I feel like there should be chimes. Or theme music of some kind, as we launch into this endeavor. But instead it’s only me, struggling to be amusing yet informative.
Ernest Poole was, apparently, a journalist-turned author whose first novel, The Harbor, got a lot of notice in 1915. His Family was his second novel; he later went on to cover Russia in the first years of the revolution for the New Republic.
The eponymous fam is Roger Gale’s. Born on a small farm in New Hampshire, Gale comes to New York City at the age of 17 to seek his fortune, and finds it running a clipping service. (In the days before Google News and Perez Hilton, social climbers, celebrities, and business titans had to pay somebody to go through a newspaper and cut out all the articles that mentioned them for later perusal; that’s what Gale’s firm does.) When the book opens, Gale’s about sixty. His wife has passed away some years earlier, and after years spent burying his grief in his business, his wife’s final words, “We will live on in our children’s lives,” have started to haunt him, and he decides to pay more attention to — DUNH DUNH DUN — his family.
Which consists of: Edith, 35, married with five kids of her own; Deborah, 29 -ish, the principal of a progressive tenement school, and Laura, 20-ish, a sort of proto-flapper, who’s into dinner, dancing and fast cars.
I was about to type “not that much happens in the book.” But when I stop and think about it, a lot happens — there’s two births, three deaths, three marriages and one divorce. However, not a lot changes about the characters in the book. Edith starts out wrapped up in her kids, and ends that way; Deborah starts out wrapped up in her school and ends that way; Laura starts out wrapped up in herself and ends that way. Roger starts out a befuddled old codger and ends….a dead befuddled old codger. The biggest unresolved question through most of the book is whether or not Deborah will get married; there’s a handsome doctor with the hots for her, but she’s afraid that if she marries she’ll turn into her sister and get so wrapped up in her own kids she lets her school slide.
The rest of the plot, such as it is, mostly deals with the character’s reaction to the various milestones I mentioned above — to go into further detail would be far more spoiler-riffic than illuminating.
