We Came Along with a Hammer

…I’m not quite done with it yet, but midway through I kind of want to grab Edna Ferber by the scruff of the neck an say, “Listen, lady, if you don’t can it with the foreshadowing there’s gonna be no plot left to reveal.”

So far it’s better than a lot of what we’ve been reading — Ferber has these glimmers of pure genius, like the description of how the a one-room prairie school house smells in the morning when you walk in the door — but there’s a glibness to her writing, and a remove. Subtle, but there. You find in Thackeray, as well — he loves Becky Sharp (as does the right-thinking reader) but whenever he forced to take up the thread of his nominal protagonist, Amelia, you can practically hear the sigh and see the moue, because she’s dull as a rag and empty-headed as a doll, and Thackeray knows it; a faint contempt bleeds through the ink in every line he gives her. Ferber isn’t bored by her characters, exactly, but she yet seems to hold herself above them. You picture her as if sitting in a chair off to the side, raising her eyebrows and giving a little shrug: “Well, what did you expect, after all?” It’s very different from the way, say, Cather writes about her Claude. He, too, is marked out as one of fortune’s fools early on in his book, but Cather, while seeing quite clearly his limitations and hang ups, yet sympathizes with him intensely as well, allows Claude to attain and us to shares with him moments of profound grace. Ferber so far, hasn’t done that, she pulls back a little even at her most expansive — she has the kind of eye that always notices the dirt on the floor.