Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, part 1
DV: So, how far are you into that thing [Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield], anyway? I’m probably fifty, sixty pages in.
DP: Yeah, you’re farther than I am. I just got the book and I’m probably about twenty pages in. So they just went home from the ball. There are lots of balls.
DV: Yeah.
DP: But not those kinds of balls.
DV: Not so far.
DP: No, there are just actual… balls. Dances. There are a lot of social mores being defied in very subtle ways.
DV: “Subtle” is not the word I would use.
DP: [laughs] No, well, you know what I mean. There’s like a “sorting matches” kind of vibe about the whole thing. The most scandalous thing in the whole book so far is, like, her garish red hair.
DV: Yeah, and the fact that she, like, looks at people. She just has an air about her.
DP: And the other one, too… and honestly, their names are very close together and it’s going to bother me for the whole book. There’s a Sabine and a Sibyl and an Olivia and a Therese, but she’s only referred to once by her first name, and I already have them confused. Which is the mother and the daughter? The one sort-of cougar is too fiery in the way she looks at people and the other is just too languid in the way she looks at people. And both are very offensive.
DV: I feel like this is going to be hard to evaluate because it’s like asking “is this a good or a bad dinosaur?” I can see the movie they would have made of this in 1932, the drawing room drama with Katharine Hepburn. That’s so distinctive a genre that I can’t tell if this is a good example of it or even a good book or what.
DP: That’s been the major drama in any of these books that we’ve read about society. It’s all looking at people the wrong way or wearing a dress that’s out of date. It’s like Alice Adams without the snobbery.
DV: Or they’re actually rich.
DP: Yeah, that’s true. I did think in the beginning, “You’re [Diablevert’s] from Boston? Is this what it was like?”
DV: No! I’ve heard rumors of such, but it died over a hundred years ago. I came from the wrong side of the tracks anyway. The idea of Boston as this dying cultural center, that it would have been the “it” city of the 1800s, was slowly dying off and falling away from a leadership position. Like, that all happened a hundred years ago. You just have no concept of that now.
DP: Boston before the Red Sox, I don’t know much about.
DV: People do still talk about the Transcendentalists.
DP: That’s right! It’s only been twenty pages and I’ve forgotten about the weird off-handed references to Emerson, which, honestly, I don’t think Emerson would want you to take his name in snootiness. That’s kind of not the point of Emerson. Also, a society in which James Russell Lowell is a mad crazy paparazzi-worthy houseguest is just difficult to…
DV: Yeah, I feel like it’d be like writing a book about Greenwich Village now, with the grandma character always bitching about how much cooler it was back in the 50s, how Greenwich Village is slowly becoming yuppified and dying. There was a period in the 1860s where Boston was probably the leading intellectual city in the country and New York was much more about commerce.
DP: But these people aren’t particularly intellectual. I don’t think that they’re so celebratory towards Emerson because of anything that he wrote, but just his sheer celebrity, or his uppercrust-ness.
DV: I think it’s the same way that nowadays New York looks down on LA, because New Yorkers consider themselves to be smarter and more of an intellectual hotspot. I think Boston had that kind of… that weight of history happening. Maybe more the way London was. Boston’s a provincial city. It’s one of the leading provincial cities, but well behind New York, L.A., Washington.
DP: Chicago, even.
DV: Chicago’s a much bigger city. Given its size, Boston carries a lot of weight, culturally. But that makes the book tough to evaluate, because that atmosphere is kind of extinct for so long that it’s hard to tell whether it’s true or clichéd or what.
DP: Sometimes I feel like it’s not very fair of us to read these books because we’re accustomed to so much more just happening in a book. Honestly, when you compare it to the most recent Pulitzer winner, Oscar Wao, which is a very action-packed book… the history is full of sturm und drang, there’s a lot of drama, there’s a lot going on. It lives in this sea of pop culture that these older books just simply don’t. So for this major prizewinner to have the first twenty pages just be about who looked at each other wrong at a ball…
DV: But at the same time, isn’t that fucking The House of Mirth? And all Henry James?
DP: I guess this just has no air of danger. In The Age of Innocence, I felt like someone was always about have their bodice get ripped off, like we were just one step away from total utter…
[DV scoffs]
DP: OK, we were many many steps and longing glances away from someone shedding a bustle, but… these books just seem very safe to me. They’re safe, they’re traditional in plot, in style, they’re beside the point of modernism. Unless we start to go all “Moo cow” in fifty more pages, I’m like…
DV: Maybe. There was that weird D.H. Lawrence-y bit where the groom was looking into the ball.
DP: That’s right! What was up with that?
DV: I don’t know! I was, like, “where are we going with this?” Because if he turns out to be a major character, this will be pretty much like D.H. Lawrence.
DP: There’s some weird foreshadowing here. Well, from the beginning of the book (and I think we both Twittered this), we start in the first three sentences with the word “bedizened”
DV: Sidebar: “bedizened” was in the New Yorker this week. It’s so weird. I’d never heard that word before and now it’s twice in one week.
DP: Someone else is reading this book! Does it mean “bedazzled”?
DV: I believe so, yes.
DP: There you go. Not a bad word, necessarily.
DV: It has a musty old-timey-ness that feels forced.
DP: It is old-timey. It is like Ye Olde Vocabulary Teste.
DV: After the ball, she goes upstairs and sees her husband… have you gotten to that bit yet?
DP: No, I haven’t gotten to that bit yet. She just saw her aged father-in-law down the hallway.
DV: It’s like what you were talking about before, like watching something that’s been ripped off many times. I can’t tell whether this was a cliché at the time, but it does just feel very much like that Eddie Izzard bit. “I guess you’d better had.” I’m trying to give the book the benefit of the doubt, but I get the strong feeling that…
DP: Well, there’s the possibility that we’re not picking up on the cultural nuances in it, in that the difference between phat with a “ph” and fat with an “f”… I don’t know. That we’re sensitive to micro-distinctions in celebrity and slang that maybe there are micro-distinctions here we’re just not picking up on.
DV: (skeptically) It’s possible.
DP: I’m also a little troubled in my OCD by the fact that this is the middle book of a trilogy, so I can’t help but think that maybe there was stuff going into it that we should know from the book prior. We’re gonna have this problem later when we get to the Rabbit books in that the first one or two Rabbit books did not win a Pulitzer but the second two did.
DV: Well, I’ve read Rabbit, Run. It’s funny: there was a review that I read this week about how you can’t understand that book until you’re the age that Rabbit is and realizing that your life is not going to amount to a whole lot. So part of me wonders if I’d feel differently about it now.
DP: (vehemently) I hate that book. I hate all of those books.
DV: Rabbit was such a jackass. That’s the problem with Updike: that you were supposed to feel bad for these people who treated other people like shit because they’re all confused and lonesome and things didn’t work out like they thought they would. But that does not give you an acceptable excuse to ditch your wife and baby and leave them in a depression spiral. That’s like, “No, you’re an asshole. I’m sorry.” Or, you couldn’t play basketball to make a career out of it, but that does not give you free abandon to be an ass.
DP: Well, it’s that kind of egotism and that sort of attention to Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea that he didn’t live up to his expectations so he gets free rein to be a wreck of a person and wreck all these other lives. Updike was essentially writing about these reprehensible people doing reprehensible things. It’s just not fun for me.
DV: But he doesn’t acknowledge that they’re reprehensible. They’re supposed to be lost and confused and sympathetic. That’s what gets me.
DP: I don’t know if this is going to be the same issue, to read this award-winning middle book of a trilogy will somehow be less fulfilling, mostly because I have the three-volume edition. So I will be reading the other two books out of sheer OCD. So pray for me. It’s also hard for me, because I like to judge books by their covers, and as we delve into the Pulitzer back archives in the dusty stacks in Central [Library], you can’t judge rebound library books by their covers.
DV: Some small press reissued this, I found out when I was looking for a cover image of the book. I was talking to L. about starting a new book, and she said “Yeah, you just don’t like any of those, huh?”
DP: I liked The Age of Innocence. And even So Big, a little bit.
DV: I get a sinking feeling that this book is going to be terrible.
DP: Or Booth Tarkington-esque.
DV: I don’t think it will be Booth Tarkington, because it seems to take itself a little too seriously. Tarkington had that Midwestern thing.
DP: There’s something sort of burnished and golden about this book.
DV: Booth Tarkington did that thing where he could make a pastiche of that to make fun of it, but he couldn’t do it for real. I mean, nobody does it realer than Edith Wharton. Booth Tarkington could have never written The Age of Innocence, because he was too much of a middle-class soul. Which sound fucked up to say, but whatever.
DP: I hear you. He was so class-bound that he could only see wealth from…
DV: … an outsider’s perspective. Which is normal, but Tarkington was just such a piece of shit.
DP: I guess we’d have to know more about Bromfield to know categorically if he’s writing from experience or not.
DV: I don’t think he is. The sense I get of it (after not reading much of it, to be sure) is if I tried to do an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. I wouldn’t know dick about what it was like to live the life of a rich millionaire in the 20s, other than what I’ve read about it. It feels clichéd like that. But it’s hard to tell because this whole genre is so dead-and-gone that it’s hard to say.
