We Came Along with a Hammer

Some other time I’ll have a post about Poole’s style, but writing the summary helped me pinpoint one thing I felt was a problem, reading this book — I felt that there was nothing at stake for the characters.

Let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start: Poole never gives us a reason why Roger should start paying attention to his kids when he does, after fifteen or twenty years of not giving a fig. I found this irksome, especially when an event of the early chapters — Laura’s engagement — would have made such a handy motive. Roger muddling along with his head in the clouds until Laura announces an engagement to a man he barely knows, without doing much to seek his permission, might have shook him out of his torpor and compelled him to take an interest in his kids. But instead Poole just has him deciding abruptly to take such an interest, and has Laura’s engagement take place about five chapters in. It made Roger’s supposed motive seem so wholly and clearly his author’s artifice that for me I think it undermined the whole book.

His dead wife’s injunction that they will live on in their children’s lives seemed a rather thin reed to hang the plot on anyway, and so it proves — at various times in the novel, Roger contemplates each of his kids and thinks to himself, “Yep, they are a bit like me.” And that’s about it. That’s about all you can do with that. None of his kids are so messed up that Roger is forced to recognize that something horrible and awful about himself will live on in his kids. Unless you consider Laura’s horniness, selfishness, and impetuousness to be mortal sins, which neither I nor, as the book makes clear, Roger do. Of course, Laura’s various love affairs and her attitude toward them would have been a great deal more scandalous in Poole’s day — but even so, neither Roger nor Poole condemn her, really.

So the banner announcing the Grand Theme of the Changing Generations sort of gets tacked up on the wall in chapter one, and then just hangs there limply in the background through the rest of the book, I think in part because Poole’s got so much more allegorical heavy lifting to do — each daughter is clearly meant to embody some aspect of Modern Women — Mother, Worker, Lover — and as a result they seem die-cast instead of molded; one never feels that any of the forces at work in the book are capable of shaping them, of altering them. Instead each one is supposed to be posed in certain tableaux of modern life that Poole craves to show us — the tenements, the uptown smart set, the suburban housewife. I never really cared for them as characters, although I was amused by the intricacies of the clockwork sets they moved upon.

What do you think, D.P.? Were you bothered by the static nature of the characters as I was? Or do you think I’m full of it?

This entry was posted on March 12, 2008 at 5:38 am and is filed under Ernest Poole, His Family . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.