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.