We Came Along with a Hammer

So we finally finished our first decade, and it seemed like a good time to take a quick look back and start an argument with my co-blogger by making sweeping statements about which books were best. Here’s my list:

1. Age of Innocence
2. Bridge of San Luis Rey
3. One of Ours
4. So Big
5. Scarlet Sister Mary
6. Magnificant Ambersons
7. Alice Adams
8. Arrowsmith
9. Early Autumn
10. His Family
11. Able McLaughlins

I think I may be going soft. Looking back at this first decade of the Pulitzers, I am struck by the virtues of the first batch of books that we’ve idly slogged though, even though at the time I whinged again and again about their flaws.

Succumbing — as we all must sometimes — to my inner Nick Hornby, I found I met in the middle while making my rankings.

Age of Innocence deserves its reputation as a classic, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey’s contemporary reputation could use a little dusting and buffing; I enjoyed both those books thoroughly. And while the plots of each had their flaws, both One of Ours and So Big had passages of quite fine writing (though I’d hand the laurel clearly to Cather over Ferber).

Meanwhile, down the other end of the scale The Able McLaughlins was plumb terrible, elevated, I must imagine, more for its wholesomely exotic frontier setting that for it style or its story, while His Family was frequently, leadenly awkward and Louis Bromfield hadn’t ever met a subtext he didn’t feel like explicating at tedious length.

The middle patch — Ambersons and Alice Adams and Arrowsmith — were more dull and irritating than bad, exactly; united in their snobbishness. And Scarlet Sister Mary is the odd duck; parts of it were charming, but the thorough racism of the whole text always left a sour taste beneath the sweet idyll of its island setting.

Looking at the books as a group, I’m also struck by how large a theme the Frontier is. The high prairie turns up as a literal setting in One of Ours, So Big, Arrowsmith, and Able McLaughlins. But many of the other books describe people pushing at the boundaries in other ways: Alice Adams and Ambersons describe the transformation of a small town into a big city. More metaphorically, His Family, Early Autumn, and Scarlet Sister Mary all share characters who rebel against sexual constraint, and try and strike out new roles for themselves, while Arrowsmith charts a doctor pushing the envelope of his field. Again and again, we find characters trying to cope with a world transformed from the one they knew in youth, to seize the new opportunities opened to them thereby, and not get stuck and crushed by the past.

Actually, after a memory-refreshing google and and a little bit more thought, I don’t know that Frontier is quite the word I want. Post-frontierism might be better, if that were a real word. These books aren’t really all that interested in cowboys and Indians and Conestoga wagons, about conquering the wilderness. They’re more interested in what happens when we’ve finally hit the end of the road. Picture a tired pioneer on a bluff over the Pacific, in that moment after the journey’s end, when, having drunk in its blue vastness at last, with the tang of the salt still in her nose, and the ocean breeze whipping her hair, she turns around to look back over how far she’s come, searching the land with troubled eyes: What is this place we have created? Does it have room in it for dreamers? For love? Who are these new people who have scrambled to fill the empty spaces? What has the scrambling made of them? For what do they scramble still?

Maybe it’s an odd thing that the books I like best and frankly think were best were the ones which don’t share this sense of tackling a new world of new mores; the Age of Innocence is set thirty or forty years before it was published, while Bridge is set in a half-fantasy world a continent and two centuries apart from the 1920s. Perhaps the seeming oddness explains itself: Only very fine writing could have put these books at the head of the pack when the judges were so otherwise swayed by the attempt to take on contemporary social concerns.

It looks like we might be getting a wider picture of the world in the decade to come, what with books set in China, on a Navajoh reservation, in Civil War Atlanta, and among the migrant workers of California. But after the first batch, I’m cultivating a sneaky hope that some of them won’t fit in at all, and will have bashed their way onto the list in all their frivolity on pure style alone…I think I may be turning into Oscar Wilde. Bit of a terrifying prospect, but maybe I’ll get to shag Jude Law.

This entry was posted on October 3, 2009 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Edna Ferber, Ernest Poole, Historical Context, Julia Peterkin, Louis Bromfield, Margaret Wilson, Oliver LaFarge, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.