Ratings in Review
After some delay, here are my rankings:
1. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
2. The Age of Innocence
3. So Big
4. Early Autumn
5. Scarlet Sister Mary
6. One of Ours
7. Arrowsmith
8. The Magnificent Ambersons
9. Alice Adams
10. The Able McLaughlins
11. His Family
Some strong similaries between Diablevert’s rankings and mine, some minor shifting of one book slightly above another, and a large difference of opinion on Bromfield and Cather. (Well, this particular Cather. My Antonia is one of my favorite books. One of Ours, not so much.) I agree with d.v.’s assessment of the post-frontier theme (and why is it that she always manages to put things so eloquently and then I come in and bat clean-up? The perils of having an awesome co-blogger… and yes, I am sucking up since my rankings are mucho belated.)
Anyhoo, this is mostly a matter of taste here: The Age of Innocence is pretty clearly a better book, more layered and masterfully written, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey had a magical clarity about it, that oracular quality that good speculative fiction has, that made me really love it. Both were books I might not have picked up and I’m truly grateful to have read. So Big is uneven at best, but there was enough humor and charm to keep me genuinely engaged, and Selina still stands in my mind months later as an engaging character.
I think I’m giving Bromfield more credit than diablevert because I went on to read The Green Bay Tree and A Good Woman. Not that I think any of those individual books is particularly good, but the three together present Bromfield’s project pretty well: the degradation of proper New England families to industrialization and the rabble. Then it’s pretty much a race to the bottom: Scarlet Sister Mary is interesting but paternalistic, One of Ours is too emo, Arrowsmith is too long with too much science talk, Booth Tarkington is condescending in both of his winning novels, The Able McLaughlins is just plain bad, and His Family was even worse. Sprinkle a hearty dash of sexism over the lot and you just about have the final six.
I do think the Pulitzers are improving in general, if they have a tendency to memorialize the patrician, the schlocky bestseller, and the schmoopy. The 1930s bring us a bunch of books that neither of us have heard of (and may not even be physically available to us… I think we irreparably damaged the already-tattered sole surviving copy of Years of Grace in any of the NYC public library systems). But we do have Gone with the Wind, The Yearling, and The Grapes of Wrath to look forward to… oh, and The Good Earth. *le sigh*
November 10, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I can’t believe you have Bromfield so high. He’s not a good writer. He’s just not. I think you’ve been hypnotized by your completest compulsion — just because you spent so many hours with doesn’t mean he doesn’t suck.
I also find it funny that you have One of Ours so low — to me it really seems like it hinges on the fact that you were semi-spoiled with that book, that is, since you knew the subject as “young man goes off to war” all this stuff happened that felt like leaden foreshadowing to you, whereas I didn’t have that expectation that the war experience was the point of the book, and so the plot felt a lot more open and flexible to me. I think it’s a flawed book, but I’d have to put her above Bromfield — way above — on pure style. Lewis and Tarkington are both better writers than Bromfield. Does quality of sentence and paragraph count for nothing, missus? What is the world coming to, if so? Hrumph.