One of Ours: Summary
Willa Cather’s One of Ours, the 1923 Pulitzer Prize winner, has a simple trajectory: a young man goes off to war. You pretty much figure out where it’s gonna end from page one. But let’s go over the specifics: Claude Wheeler is the discontented son of a Nebraska farmer who feels ill-used by life from his early days at home until the end… of the book (see where this is going?). Claude’s father is an abrasive jokester who refuses to honor his request to change colleges from the Christian college he currently attends to the state university. Disappointment #1.
Claude lives a lonely life at school, nose in his books, until he meets the more charismatic Erlich family and harbors a (veiled) crush on the widowed clan matriarch. When his father chooses to expand his operations into a more distant land acquisition with Claude’s brother, Claude is forced to leave college to return home and run the family farm. Disappointment #2.
At the farm, Claude suffers an farming accident that keeps him in bed and susceptible to the pallid charms of a childhood friend, Enid Royce, whom he woos and marries. Enid turns out to be devoutly frigid, more ardent about Prohibition than her marriage. After a single year together in the home that Claude had lovingly built for them, Enid jumps at the chance to travel to China to tend to her sister, an ailing missionary. Claude shuts up the house and moves back home in semi-disgrace. Disappointment #3.
Left rootless and ashamed, Claude and his mother become caught up in news reports from the front and Claude decides to enlist in the army, finding little to keep him at home. On the ship over to France, he survives an influenza outbreak and upon arrival in France befriends an ex-violinist, David Gerhardt, who becomes a great companion and role model to Claude. Once they arrive at the front, Claude is enamored with the French countryside and finds a new lease on life amidst the horrors of war. We get this through rapturous descriptions of the way the light shines through the trees alternating with brutal, if matter-of-fact, accounts of trench warfare. Claude makes his way around the front, being involved in minor actions and taking refuge with his unit in the countryside, until he is (spoiler alert!) killed in battle. I’d count this as Disappointment #4 except that the moments before his death are some of the most powerful and transcendent seconds of his life. Sad, but true.
