A quick and dirty summary of this one, I think, so’s I don’t clog up my beautiful rant about what I thought of the book.
Years of Grace is about a young woman, Jane Ward, growing up in late-Victorian Chicago. Not a couple of words you see often paired, Victorian and Chicago, but trust me, here they fit. Jane comes from a well-to-do family; her soft-hearted father and prim mother both keep close tabs on her, and she’s allowed all the freedoms a respectable teenage girl would have had in the 1890s, which is to say, none. (She has a mild freak out when she finds herself on such wildly bohemian sprees as hanging out with two friends, one of them a boy, and cooking supper for themselves without any adult supervision, in the middle of the afternoon, at the age of 16.)
Said boy is named Andre; he has a bit better claim to bohemianism, being the son of a French civil servant with aspirations of becoming a sculptor. Jane, naturellement, falls in love with him. He does the honorable thing and—before they get past several longing looks and a smooch or two—goes to her father to ask for her hand. Jane’s mother hits the roof, goes right on through, and is last seen sailing over Lake Michigan, and even her doting father puts his grim face on. They lay down the law: Cease all contact for the next four years, and if by then you two crazy kids still keep in your breasts the eternal flame (at the ripe old ages of 21 and 23, respectively) well, then we’ll see.
Faced with the choice of eloping with her lover or being entirely cut off from him for the next four years….Jane basically never considers eloping with her lover and meekly accepts being cut off from him for the next four years. They part tearfully, and Jane grows a smallish pair and forces her mother to let her attend Bryn Mawr, in order to get out of the house and further her intellectual development, in that order.
Jane loves Brynn Mawr, flitting though some of her classes but digging up on poetry and history and generally being all stimulated and whatnot. She also enjoys rooming with one of her best friends from back home, Agnes, a whip-smart but regrettably plain girl who comes from a much poorer family than Jane’s. But at the close of her second year at college, Jane’s older sister gets married and moves out of the house. Jane’s mother, lonely and anxious that Jane should make her debut and hook up with a young man of the non-French, non-artistic, non-starving kind, asks her not to go back for her third. And Jane agrees.
After several months at home, Jane meets a young fellow named Stephen, from an old Boston family, newly arrived in Chicago to be trained up as a banker. Stephen’s making calf-eyes at her almost immediately, but Jane stiff-arms him for months as she waits for her 21st birthday to roll around, as she’s still carrying a torch for Andre. The pressure’s getting pretty intense for her to get hitched, however, as the Spanish-American War has broken out and Stephen’s signed up with the Rough Riders, and is pulling the ol’ faithful, “Perhaps, if I live,” routine. Her faith is not proved foolish however, as shortly after her birthday, a letter indeed arrives from her old flame.
It contents are less pleasing than its existence. Andre writes that he’s a bit nervous and ambivalent, as he not sure she still cares for him, but he would very much like to see her. But his sculpting career is actually going quite well at the moment, and he’s just been awarded a prestigious prize which comes along with a fellowship. He plans to accept, and as a result, he may not be able to get to America for many months. Kthxbai.
Jane, who’s left a doleful Stephen at the bottom of the stairs in his doughboy uniform in order to read the letter, throws a hissy. Basically, she’d been carrying this romantic ideal in her head that Andre’d drop everything for her, and when he choose his work over their reunion she decided upon the instant that she’s been a fool, and writes back a sniffy letter telling him don’t bother thanks, she’s going to marry Stephen instead.
And so she does. She then had three kids, two girls and a boy, and for the next fifteen years or so leads the quiet life of the wealthy wife of a staid banker. Stifled and bored, something finally comes along to break up the monotony: On a visit to her old friend Anges, now living in New York, Jane meets Agnes’s husband, Jimmy Trent, a n’er-do-well composer/critic who just happens to be planning an extended stay in Chicago to take a temporary post as a reviewer for a big paper there.
After a prolonged tête-à-tête on the train back, Jane begins to feel a little fluttery over Jimmy, and he mounts an earnest campaign for her heart and/or pants. He’s over the house all the time, charms the kids, hell, he even gets along with her husband. When he finally makes his pass, however, Jane gives him the boot immediately, horrified at the idea of disgracing her family. He mopes off to Europe (abandoning Agnes, and his daughter) and eventually ends up drafted into the German army and killed at the front early in WWI. Jane sheds a few tears and forgets ‘im.
That brief spark of romance is the last she is to have; while Jane remains our protagonist, the action now shifts to the younger generation, Jane’s kids and their cousins and friends, seen through Jane’s eyes. Her eldest daughter marries her first cousin, another young soldier about to be posted to the front. A few years go by, she has a few kids, and here things begin to take a turn.
A series of deliberate parallels are set up between Jane’s generation and that of her children, with her eldest daughter standing in for her, and her younger kids mimicking the lives of their aunt and uncle, Stephen’s sibling. Except when Jane’s daughter grows bored with her marriage and falls for a new man, she decides to chuck it all, divorce her husband, move to Europe and marry the new guy. And when her other two kids unexpectedly come into an inheritance, they seize their chance to break free of Jane and her set, with the son, rather Niles Crane-ishly, buying a town house on Beacon Hill and getting into antiquing while her daughter buys a farm, starting a dog-breeding business together with a “friend” with whom she also shares a pied-a-terre in the city where they can entertain their musical theater friends. While wearing bobbed hair and men’s silk pajamas.
Jane frets about all of these developments. She’s disappointed in her son’s decision to move away, confounded by her younger daughter’s smart set friends, and disappointed and ashamed of her eldest daughter’s decision to divorce. And though she knows it’s her and not them who are out of temper with the times, she worries that none of them will end up happy. As she has, pretty much, with Stephen. Bored, but happy.
Her acceptance of her fate and approval of her own decision is sealed by a reunion with Andre in the book’s final pages, when she travels to Paris to witness her daughter’s second marriage. For Andre, though he remembers her fondly, has grown old and cynical during his own unhappy marriage to a younger woman, and tells her ruefully that maybe it was better that they never got together, since they’d inevitably have wearied of each other. Jane takes his assessment as confirmation that she was right to write him off years ago, and rides back to Stephen, comforted, conventional, and safe as she was when she started the book.
