I’ve been moping around for days, trying to think of something one could say about Alice Adams. And I haven’t figured it out yet, mostly, I think, because I disliked it. (Also I probably read it too fast—did you every do that? Get stuck somewhere—an airport, a train station—and read a book in a gulp? You can’t do it with everything, the book has to be a bit glib for it to work. They never stick, later, you’re left with just a foggy impression of the contents, but if you re-read you still remember enough for the plot to be unsurprising. Rather like bolting down some Micky D’s in similar circs. — it’s enough to ruin your appetite for dinner, yet you still feel unsatisfied.)
In fact, the most confounding and intriguing thing to me about Alice Adams, is what it says about Booth Tarkington, now we’ve read two of his books. (What it says about the Pulitzer peeps, that they gave the prize twice to Tarkington, I leave for Dread. P. to explicate.)
Tarkington was born in Indiana, and lived most of his life in Indianapolis, the son of apparently mildly prosperous middle-class parents. He got into Princeton — but never graduated, apparently because his parent couldn’t afford for him to go back for his last year. He was voted most popular in his class, editor of the literary review — and then found himself shipped back to Indianapolis, where he spent the next seven years living in his parent’s house and papering his bedroom walls with rejection slips, until hitting it big with a book called The Gentleman from Indiana.
Having finally achieved success, he got married, ran for state rep, served one term and then moved to Europe. He spent the next ten years writing some and drinking a lot, before getting a divorce, heading back home to Indianapolis, getting married again, and putting his nose to the grindstone. He soon came out with some of his most successful stuff, including Ambersons and Alice Adams and especially, apparently, a series of novels on the harmless boyish adventures of a character called Penrod, which were huge at the time but don’t seem to be read any more. He spent the next twenty years or so wintering in Indy, summering in Kennebunkport, ME and regularly jaunting off to Europe to collect art.
The more I read of the above bio, the more it appears to explain to me about Tarkington’s attitude toward his characters. Reading Ambersons, I thought his wry authorial distance helped make bearable the insufferable George; reading Alice Adams, what I initially took for sympathy turned out to be snobbery incredibly well-disguised. Having read both, I’m now inclined to think that what they share is condescension. Tarkington’s the too-cool-for-school kid, capable of sneering at both the squares and the greasers, who gets stuck in his hometown running his pop’s insurance office just the same. Like James Joyce if he’d never been able to leave Ireland. (Well, a Joyce with about 1/5 of Joyce’s talent.)
Then again, not Joyce, perhaps; with Joyce you often feel an underlying anger, a sense that he wants to reach through the page and shake his characters. In Dubliners he takes as his theme the crippling paralysis of Irish society: again and again are characters trapped into lifelong unhappiness because they are unwilling to break themselves free, to risk censure, to take a chance; their fear disapproval and damnation is too great. (See, for example, “A Little Cloud,” “Eveline,” “The Boarding House,” “A Painful Case.”) And that pisses Joyce off. He is describing something he wishes were otherwise. (He himself, of course, bolted the first chance he got.)
Tarkington, on the other hand, is content to sit back and judge his characters from on high. He has an intense nostalgia for the past, the terms and conditions of his own late 19th-century youth, and even as he catalogues the depredations the 20th century is wreaking on his idyll—coal blackening the streets, immigrants flooding the city, mansions turned to boarding houses, the streets overrun with the cars that run down George Amberson Minifer and the back alleys with the bars that Walter Adams shoots dice in—he seems to blandly regard them as inevitable, and the pitiable fates of people so grasping and commerce-driven no more than to be expected. He holds himself above the people he writes about, even as he so minutely describes the circumscribed world he and they share. Flaubert said of his own pretentious, ambitious, over-reaching bourgeois heroine, “I am Madame Bovary.” But Tarkington ain’t Alice, noway nohow.
Which leave the rather interesting question of who he might be — and if pressed I’d say he’s Russell, Alice’s bland beau. Russell, after all, is fond of Alice, enchanted by her, likes her even more for lying to him because she’s so good at it, so much so that all that she says and does retains a slight air of mystery and thus of flirtation. But when he sees the real Alice, comes to comprehend the actual social status and position of Alice and her family—well, then it’s curtains. The book itself does something similar—presents Alice in the beginning as sympathetic, charming, if a bit bubble-headed—and then as it draws to a climax, allows her to become ridiculous, foolish, her pretensions merely that, her fate sealed. After reading about him, it’s easy for me to imagine Tarkington, too, as a besotted youth, enchanted by an unsuitable girl and then ditching her with a fair amount of smooth self-congratulation when it became clear she’d be a hindrence to his ambitions…
