We Came Along with a Hammer

George Amberson Minafer is the “little tin god on wheels” who presides over The Magnificent Ambersons, the living embodiment of pride that goeth before the fall. Reversing the thrust of the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger narrative, we take part in the decline of the Amberson fortunes into poverty and obscurity. Booth Tarkington’s authorial claim to fame here should be creating the biggest twit in world literature, a Mona Lisa of a portrait in asshat-itude.

The plot of the story is relatively simple: we follow the fortunate son of a mighty Midwestern family (their location always described as a “Midland town”) from his pampered youth through his callow college days. At a lavish ball thrown in his honor, he meets Lucy Morgan, the daughter of his mother’s old flame, Eugene Morgan, an inventor and innovator of the automobile. Tarkington gets a lot of mileage (ha!) out of this character, as George takes many opportunities to drive around in various horse-drawn carriage and deride the automobile as it, y’know, speeds past him. As he and Lucy court to the brink of marriage, the Amberson family is slowly being dragged into the muck: relatives preemptively withdrawing their share of the estate and running off to Italy, the death of George’s ineffectual father, the sale of Amberson land, and the growing shabbiness of the physical estate.

Throughout the general decline, George remains steadfastly oblivious until his spinster aunt Fanny alerts him to the rekindled romance between his mother, Isabel, and Eugene. He flies into a rage disproportionate to his former condescension toward his father, forbids the chance of marriage between his mother and Eugene or Lucy and himself, and takes his mother off to Europe, where she weakens from a mysterious and hereditary “complaint.” They return home just in time for a deathbed scene at Amberson Manor and then the death of Major Amberson, George’s grandfather. There’s nothing left to the family fortune after that—all is sold off and George and Fanny are stuck with each other, essentially penniless. George takes a job as an explosives expert to support their frail household, considering that the more dangerous the job, the higher the pay. Both of his legs are broken in a freak automobile accident, which sends Lucy back to his bedside, her love undiminished through their separation.

A happy ending? Did he get the comeuppance so longed-for throughout the book? A cautionary tale? A nostalgic portrait of a kinder, gentler time, when everyone knew their neighbors and there was only one set of rich holier-than-thou bastards to revile and we all did that together? Let’s discuss!