Early Autumn: Summary, Slightly Belated
Sorry that we started the in-depth discussion of Early Autumn without the traditional summary to bring you up-to-speed (or for intrepid book report cheaters to one day crib). Here we go:
The 1927 Pulitzer winner Early Autumn by man-about-town Louis Bromfield looks into the lives of the Pentland clan, whose roots in their New England community stretch Pilgrim-ward. We’ve got Olivia Pentland, long-suffering wife of Anson Pentland, who’s perpetually writing a history of his family of interest to precisely no one; mother to Sylvia Pentland, dewily on the market; and the sickly Jack Pentland, a.k.a. Young Master Not-long-for-this-world. Also, there’s a bitchy aunt who’s all up in everyone’s business, a melancholy and alcoholic grandfather who is Olivia’s secret ally against the rest of the family, and a madwoman in the attic. Just your standard moneyed New England house of slow, dreary horrors.
The change agents come in the form of Sabine, a cousin (if I remember correctly) and childhood playmate of Anson’s, who returns from Europe with a tarnished reputation and a scientifically-inclined daughter of marriageable age, and John O’Hara, a “shanty Irish” up-and-coming politician who takes up residence in a nearby cottage and casts an appreciative eye in Olivia’s direction. Desire long dead in Olivia’s heart is stirred by his attentions, and she spends the bulk of the book contemplating adultery. Unfortunately, the death of her son, the elopement of her daughter Sabine with a visiting French musician, and the suicide-framed-as-accidental death of her father-in-law, the scion of the Pentland clan, forestall any actual play.
There’s a strong historical subplot in the middle of the book about Pentland ancestors who actually managed to do something genuinely scandalous, and this refracts forward and backward into Pentland family history, casting aspersions on the purity of the bloodline and generally throwing into stark tragicomic relief Aunt Cassie’s self-righteous meddling and Anson’s stony propriety. The novel ends with Olivia turning to a home now empty of her allies (father-in-law and daugher) and a future spent maintaining the stalwart bloodline and heritage for which she cares nothing.
