So Big… trails off.
I actually liked So Big, for all its faults. I enjoyed its grown-up Little House on the Prairie-ness and the sly tone that Ferber took in her narration. (The winking at the characters didn’t bother me, even as it turns the book into an uneasy mix of snarky and genuine.) I’m waiting for all the Pulitzer Prize winners to stop being a retelling of the country mouse/city mouse dichotomy, though, and I think it’s fascinating how preoccupied they all are with the advent of the automobile. This is the first extended effort I’ve made since college in consistently reading books written before 1940–you just forget how other the past can be, how different the preoccupations and details of daily life were a hundred years ago.
That said, this book had one heck of a whimper for an ending. Is Ferber being angst-ridden, oblique, or just lazy? There’s neither any old-fashioned resolution (and this would have been a very easy book to end with a wedding, whether So Big’s or Selina’s) nor a particularly evocative question at the end… just a trailing off into the future, where before Ferber was all foreshadowing and trajectory. This was incredibly frustrating for a book that had been quite satisfying to read for the first 150 or so pages: rich in detail, narrated with good humor, full of colorful characters. This is a problem I often have with family-centered stories, to prefer the older generations to the younger, and to feel that there is something unsatisfying in the entropy or fall from grace that is common in multigenerational novels. Throw in as another negative the completely ridiculous character of Dallas O’Mara–Ferber, on this matter, I call “Bullshit”–as the center of the novel’s conclusion.
Dallas O’Mara: a more ridiculous Mary Sue I’ve never encountered, and Selina DeJong is a pretty bad one. At least Ferber paints Selina as a little flighty, a little deluded, and unafraid of the late-in-life frump to mellow her otherwise sterling character…. but Dallas is all paint-on-the-tip-of-her-nose, same-smile-for-the-busboy, exceedlingly-rich-but-unconcerned-with-money, author’s projection of perfection. It’s hard to stomach. Introducing this nauseating character so late in the game throws the novel off-center and contributes to the weak ending.
October 31, 2008 at 2:53 pm
That’s funny that Dallas bothered you so much — I agree she’s completely unrealistic, but I didn’t mind here getting under the skin of the smooth So Big. Because the end was such a muddle — that kind-of affair with the socialite, and meanwhile he’s beating off the rest of rich, female Chicago with a stick — it was nice to see him get a bit of a comeuppance. That was the problem with the whole second half, it seemed to me — Ferber would get interested in a character for five or ten pages and then kind of put them down and walk away, and the story began to unravel…there’s the unfashionable adult student at his college, and the socialite and her lonely, direct-dial line scene — but then both of these are left to drift off without a real resolution…
June 16, 2009 at 10:57 am
I thought they should have dropped the last third of the book – i.e. all the parts with Sobig’s narrative voice, because he sucks and is boring, and the people in his life mostly are too. If they had, I would have liked it better. Sort of the opposite problem with Early Autumn – that book could’ve used with a lot more after the ending we get.
December 7, 2009 at 8:02 am
I have to say you echo a lot of my feelings about this book (though I think I side more with Diablevert about Dallas…she didn’t bother me as I was reading her…I have to admit that, now I’ve seen your take on her, I’m going back over the last few chapters and thinking “man, she is a bit annoyingly ‘perfect’”.
The ending, I think, is Ferber trying to do what Wharton did to Newland Archer: it’s just another variation on “society young man can’t escape his unbearable life”. Only Wharton had invested the whole novel in that society and that young man’s ties to it, while Ferber has done the setup at high speed (and somewhat distractedly, as you rightly note), and with a young man who could very believably leave bond-trading behind, either to toil as an architect or an asparagus farmer. But Ferber’s so sold on her ending, she has Dallas basically tell Dirk flat out that there’s no way he can change (after all, the man is almost 30…clearly it’s too late for him), just to make sure the reader doesn’t get confused.
But I liked the beginning of this book (and much of the middle) enough that it bothers me it ended this way. I have to say I liked the book, and would recommend it to others. I just wish the finale had worked better. This is one of those cases where a happy ending would have been much more believable….Selina marrying Roelf would have been both a little edgy (given their disparate ages) and entirely in character for them both. Dirk’s redemption and marrying Dallas would have been a bit more “Chicken Soup for the Soul” but it would have been more organic to the book than the ending we got.
Well, on from here to Arrowsmith–I’ve always wanted to read Sinclair Lewis. We’ll see if he lives up to the hype.