At first I didn’t know how I was going to write this post, but then I realized all I had to do was the summary to start, and I could palm off a coherent reaction to the book’s themes and place in history to Penny. (Got that, babe? Give me half a blue exam booklet or so, and I’ll be watching for over-large margins.)
So Big: I should have known something was off when the gambler died in the first chapter. The back of the book, see, promises we get to follow the “travails of a gambler’s daughter” in early 20th century Chicago, and I was all set for something involving jet-beaded flapper dresses, cloches and handguns. We get two out of three — one at the beginning and one at the end, and in between them miles exactly the kind of prairie grass I’d thought we’d left behind with Willa and the McLaughlins.
I’m being a bit too metaphorical. Pragmatically, then: It’s the gay nineties, and Selina Peake is our heroine, mostly. She’s the daughter or Simeon Peake, a New England farmer turned High Plains grifter, a man who makes his money at the tables and who keeps his daughter at the Ritz in furs when he’d up and at a flop-house among the cabbage-eaters when he’s down. The only thing he manages to keep up steadily is Selina’s schooling, which comes in handy when he’d accidentally shot during an argument at a gambling den and dies leaving her “two fine clear blue-white diamonds…and the sum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars in cash.” Left to her own devices, Selina buys herself a plain brown dress (and a wine-red cashmere) and sets off to a post as a prairie school teacher, with the light heart of an adventurer and the eye of an aesthete.
They don’t get her too far — her first burble of pleasure at the beauty of the ripening fields becomes a refrain of mingled ridicule and incomprehension on the part of the stolid Dutch farming community she’s landed among (“Cabbages is beautiful!’ …he choked a little, stuttered, overcome.”). Selina is doomed to remain an outsider among them — by turns pitied and mocked. Which makes the reader dread the results when she falls for one of the overgrown Dutch boys, a tall, good-lookin’ farmer named Pervus DeJong. He saves her from public embarrassment at a church fundraiser; she offers to tutor him in repayment. During the long winter evenings, they sit over a slate in the parlor as she teaches him his three r’s and thinks idly of how much she’d like to lick him in inappropriate places. (No, really. This is a twentieth-century book for sure, maybe the first we’ve read yet.)
Next thing you know Selina’s Mrs. DeJong, mistress of a run-down vegetable farm, whose day starts at three and ends at eleven, well on her way to becoming exactly the kind of work-worn, harried, bent farm wife who appalled her when she first arrived. She has her first child, a much-loved boy—named Dirk and nicknamed So Big—and then sets to wearing herself down to the bone wit’ a quickness, futilely trying to turn her ox-brained husband’s mind and revitalize the farm, and slowly having her spirit crushed for her troubles.
An aside: This was when, as a reader, I began to feel the book was a bit of gyp. I’d been hoping for gamblers and gangsters and big city hustle, and here we were again, stuck with mud and blizzards, the stern and the taciturn.
But not to fear! Pervus, rather handily, dies of pnemonia. Selina takes over the farm, and after one rather bleak and heart-breaking attempt to sell her wares in town, is spotted by an old and now wealthy friend from finishing school, who takes her under her wing, loans her the money to fix the farm up, and helps provide for Dirk’s schooling. Lest my summary seem glib, I must report that this entire sequence of events takes about forty pages, 30 of which concern the ill-fated attempt to go to market, and ten of which account for the whole turning-of-life-around. What’s more all this takes place about halfway though the book.
The second half concerns the fate of So Big, grown to manhood handsome as his father, smart as his mother but with little of her artistic bent. In a series of vignettes, he goes to college; becomes an architect; falls halfway in love with the daughter of his mother’s old, rich friend; bums around for a while not doing too much,; goes to war, -ish; becomes a rich bond trader; has a lengthy affair with the now-married-and-rich-herself friend’s daughter; and then falls for a commercial artist named Dallas who doesn’t love him but does want to paint a portrait of his mother. Selina herself has been wandering in and out of the story all this time, fretting over So Big and trying to prompt his rather pedestrian soul to be a bit more beauty-loving and hard-working, while meanwhile becoming, herself, a 1920s Alice Waters-cum-Dorothy Day, who works hard all day growing the best vegetables in town and spends her off-hours wandering the ethnic enclaves of Chicago, learning to love pirogues and collard greens. The end. (No really, that’s pretty much how it ends — there’s a big reunion dinner at the farm, where one of Selina’s proteges from her teaching days comes back, So Big’s artist friend offers to paint her portrait, and So Big has to leave early to go to a party in the city and mopes about the missed opportunities in his life. That’s how it ends. With a literal whimper.)
