Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn, Part 3
DP: I don’t get the sense that the community is that affluent. I think the Pentland family is greatly wealthy—they bring this up later, that they take great pride in living off “the income of their income.” So I think they live quite poorly in a material sense, but just have great wealth saved up.
DV: That makes sense. There’s a crack about that in the Terry Pratchett books. He makes the observation that, if you’re really wealthy, you can afford to look like shit.
DP: When they start to describe the study and all the artifacts, at some point, they expressly label them as “kinda ugly.” “We have all this old ugly shit, but hey, Emerson sat there.”
DV: That relationship makes more sense to me as the lord of the manor to the village in an English or Continental setting than it would be in a relatively contemporary American setting. He doesn’t have it clear: either it’s a bustling town or ten houses and those guys.
DP: It’s not good world-building, to use a science fiction term. If he’s not talking about a real place, he hasn’t properly mapped his imaginary landscape. Although I do think—and this is one of the great mysteries of the book to me, and I do find it compelling, like an ugly woman wearing a veiled hat—I just want to see what’s under the veil—this book is the second book in a trilogy, right?
DV: Right.
DP: Does reading the first book make this book make complete sense? There are so many characters here that I can imagine their youths were explored in the first book, even though I could totally be making this shit up and they have no connection to each other. But the whole thing with the Pentland father and the widow…
DV: That he’s macking on?
DP: Yeah! Like, is there a youth explored in the earlier books? This is the weird thing about the Pulitzer awarding books in a series, because when you’re reading them years later, obviously this is the one that history has remembered even this much. The Green Bay Tree is lost to the memory of history. But does it contain, partially, the key to this book? Later (and I hate to keep bringing them up) but when we get to the Rabbit novels, Rabbit, Run: not nominated. But you really need to understand what happened in it to get the other two. Like when Shadow Country was re-released this year and it won the National Book Award, which some people were angry about, but in a sense, well, you need to appreciate it as a unit, so… I don’t know. I have great, actual, genuine curiosity about The Green Bay Tree, whether it has all the mysteries solved.
DV: That’s interesting. I do not share that curiosity.
DP: You shan’t read the rest of A Bromfield Galaxy?
DV: I doubt it.
DP: I will probably press on nobly. I’ll keep you updated.
DV: If anything completely scandalous and awesome happens, I’d read.
DP: But in the highly likely event that it kinda sucks?
DV. Yeah, I can live.
DP: Maybe it was like the Oscars this year, in the sense that, aside from Slumdog Millionaire, everything else was a bit crap. So maybe that’s how this won.
DV: I should refer to the Stuckey. I still have a book out from the library: W.J. Stuckey’s retrospective of the Pulitzer prize winners up to, like, 1972, and he pretty much says if that year was a bit crap. Like The Able McLaughlins year was total crap.
DP: I would hope so.
DV: It wasn’t like there was a diamond in the rough that should have won that year. That was a crap year. Not like the Age of Innocence/Main Street showdown year. So know (if I remember correctly) that American literature was not overlooking something grand that year. This was just the most of the mediocre.
DP: It does feel so soap opera-y.
DV: It’s kinda trashy. Not trashy enough to be modern trashy, but it’s pretty trashy. And it gets trashier. It’s not really fun like Jacqueline Susann trashy… well, maybe it would have been at the time.
DV: Maybe it’s just scandalous enough, traipsing that border between genuinely scandalous and a little spicy. Like Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead, where people swear a lot. Like “You said fuck. In a book! Oh my word. Who is this young man?” I would say that D.H. Lawrence is similar, but he believes his own bullshit. I’m not a big D.H. Lawrence fan, These ideas were true important ideas in society, if only people weren’t so repressed. He honestly felt that way.
DP: And Bromfield doesn’t go that far. I could honestly see this ending in tragedy, pretty clearly, but maybe there’s a neat happy ending somewhere. But there’s a third book—again, knowing that it’s part of a trilogy, maybe there has to be tragedy. Maybe this is like the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, and it’s gotta end with someone encased in carbonite.
DV: It does feel like Bromfield is alluding to other books. We keep mentioning D.H. Lawrence, and it reminds me of Becky Sharp a lot, that cunning and cynical character.
DP: It’s rocking the Jane Eyre, with the madwoman in the attic, and it has to have Wharton in mind. It’s not so far removed, and Wharton was known in her day, so I wouldn’t doubt that.
DV: If he ends the book with Olivia jumping in front of a train, we’ll know he’s literally ripping off the great authors.
March 12, 2010 at 2:08 am
Interesting–I think this is the first time we’ve really parted ways on a book! I quite liked the book…I think I was more taken with Olivia than either of you were, and I feel sure I was more taken with John Pentland, since he almost figures not at all in your reflections on the book. I can’t disagree about the points you raise–telling rather than showing is an issue here, and yes Bromfield’s characters seem hung up on sex….though I have to say, I think Bromfield makes it pretty obvious that their hang-ups are awfully destructive and life-rejecting. In other words, I don’t think it’s his prudishness that’s infringing on a good story, I think it’s a story that, in part, wants to explore what it means that the old folks were all a bit weird about sex. Anyway, I appreciate your conversations, as always — they really help me think about the book in new ways! I wonder if I’ve been too enthusiastic about it … I certainly started as skeptical as you both, and for the same reasons, but somehow I ended up really taken with it by about the 75 page mark. Hmmmm. Cause for reflection, I guess.
April 12, 2010 at 2:03 pm
[...] Dreadful Penny: But I think I got all my OCD completism out with all that Bromfield. [...]