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.
DP: (skeptically) I’m discovering that I actually kinda like the Bromfield… in a weird way. How far along are you?
DV: Sabine just finished thinking that she was going to fix everyone’s life, and Olivia’s having a conversation with her daughter about…
DP: … people she might marry?
DV: Yeah. Trying to figure out how she’s going to get them out of this hell hole to where there’s actually an attractive man.
DP: (laughs) This book is actually a lot like Spinal Tap’s song “Hell Hole.” As in “You know where you stand in a hell hole. Folks lend a hand in a hell hole.” Like, their place is kind of a hell hole, but they love it, and it has its charms. They want to get out of the hell hole and meet attractive men, but in the governing system of the society, it’s a rather nice hell hole. It’s an upper-middle-class hell hole. Even an upper-UPPER-class hell hole!
DV: I’d say. I keep wondering where this actually takes place. I mean, they keep saying they’re in New Hampshire, but I know of no place in New Hampshire that has mills filled with Polish people.
DP: There’s a later reference to something about Vermont.
DV: Yeah, but he goes into Boston every day.
DP: Maybe they’re in southern Vermont? Because southern Vermont isn’t far from Boston…
DV: (waving hands) No, no! Southern Vermont’s left… on my imaginary mental map of the United States.
DV: Indeed. (persisting) No, but New Hampshire is above the northern part of Massachusetts. New Hampshire’s on the coast and then Vermont is above the Berkshires, so you could probably get from the corner of Vermont to Boston… oh man, that would take a couple hours.
DP: Drive. In cars. So I guess it must be in New Hampshire then.
DV: Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to be, but he jets off to Boston to go to work in the morning, which is dumb, so it must be in Massachusetts somewhere. But they keep mentioning New Hampshire. It’s very strange.
DP: I didn’t think about the geography of the book at all.
DV: It’s a minor quibble—I kinda knew what he was getting at—but it bugged me. There are a couple of sloppy things like that. He was specifically talking about the characters’ ages… he has Sabine thinking that she left when she was twenty, and that was twenty years ago, but then she’s more than ten years older than a guy who’s thirty-six. So, wait, was this supposed to be thirty years ago?
DP: She can’t be more than ten years older than O’Hara, because I thought she was a contemporary of Olivia, and Olivia’s only…
DV: Thirty-nine. But in that passage, he says that she [Sabine] is more than ten years older than him.
DP: Unless Sabine is supposed to be a contemporary of Anson, and Anson is greatly older than Olivia, which I didn’t think was the case.
DV: Actually, that makes more sense because it talks about them [Anson and Sabine] both being kids at the same time. Yeah. But, still, it’s weird.
DP: The math doesn’t quite add up.
DV: It’s sloppy… The book turned out to be very stiff and lockjaw-ish, and I keep getting the feeling that he does not quite know whereof he speaks. It doesn’t feel like…. like, Henry James actually grew up in a higher class and stature…
DP: Whereas Bromfield’s just talking out of his ass.
DV: Yes. I just get this talking-out-of-his-ass feeling.
DP: Like when he describes the room. The drawing-room, where there’s the desk where dear old Mr. Lowell sat… with a very vague sense of what that would actually look like and what this sort of life would actually be like.
DV: I can’t tell if that’s authentic or not, because we’re too far removed from it. There are other bits where it seems like he’s just throwing in the props that would be typical of such a thing. It feels very stage-y.
DP: Well, I really really really would like to read a book where there’s some showing and not telling because I think a lot of these books have this in common: it’s just all internal monologue and third-person omniscient narrators. So long swaths of the book are just descriptions of what the characters are thinking. It doesn’t help the staginess of it. It’s all stage directions and no action. Although, I do have to say, I’m farther along than you are, and it’s starting to get spicy. In a completely predictable way. There’s general hook-up-er and Pentland scandals are revealed. (DV speculates as to the nature of the scandals.)
DP: Oh, don’t worry, the scandals aren’t close to the main characters in any way. They’re more historical, genealogical. There’re some spicy love letters in your future. Things start to get a little funky. And in fact, there’s one plot development—is it worth it for me to tell you this or do you just want to find out on your own?—where you find out why John Pentland’s wife went mad. Because she lost her virginity.
(DV cracks up)
DP: No, honestly. She was apparently a “tender, simple woman” who was wooed “too ardently” and then went batshit crazy after she lost her virginity. Well, became a little off after she lost her virginity and went batshit crazy after she had Anson and had to be retired to the attic. Sex is like a squall in this book: it just fucks shit up. It makes the book so much weirder.
DV: Well, remember how we were talking before, that we really just wanted one of the books to not be a bildungsroman? And finally, for the first time, that’s happened. The thing it’s closest to is The Age of Innocence (which I think is a much better book) but it’s about people bursting to get out of society.
DP: And the same sort of obsession with sex and the sexual tension and the fear of class and the money. Yes.
DV: The show-y/tell-y bit struck me most in the dialogue. There’s this big long passage where Sabine and Aunt Cassie are having their showdown…
DP: Evil aunts are also a theme in these books. I keep thinking of the aunt in The Magnificent Ambersons, who maybe wasn’t evil as much as manipulative.
DV: Oh, he’s very funny. Sidebar on Wodehouse: reading him the second time is sometimes better than reading him the first time because he constructs these incredibly elaborate farce plots, very well, but the pleasure you get is from the language.
DP: The plot is beside the point?
DV: Yeah, the fact that it’s nagging at you to find out what happened next is almost irritating. Because what’s so enjoyable about it is like playing Mousetrap: watching the whole contraption go, rather than not knowing what’s going to happen. Plus the immense pleasure you get out of the references. Like one of his aunts: he always describes her as “wearing barbed wire next to skin.”
DP: That’s an apt comparison. There’s nothing more reprehensible than these aunts.
DV: Yeah, now that you mention it, the fact that she Did It (with capital letters) is pretty interesting, because he pretty much implies that Aunt Cassie got married, decided she was an invalid, waits until her husband dies, and now she’s fine. The clear implication that she’s trying to avoid… well, no naughty-naughty for you.
DP: The book is very preoccupied with sex without ever actually saying the word. There’s the weird ruination in Sabine’s past where she had the husband but I guess the husband played around, which she let him… I don’t quite understand that, but there’s something there. Then she’s got her weird daughter who’s all scientific and into frogs.
DV: I was thinking earlier it’s like D.H. Lawrence filtered through nine layers of schmuck.
DP: Then there’s the thing with the groomsman too. You’re so right! That just gets stranger and stranger and stranger as the book goes on. Higgins is a recurring character. In fact, at one point, Higgins develops this conversational affection with O’Hara, and he is trying to imply to O’Hara that Olivia’s a fine pick of a woman, and he calls her a “thoroughbred.”
DV: Ooh, that’s nice.
DP: And the implication is clear that he means “thoroughbred” in the breeding sense, because if she had been paired with a better mate, she wouldn’t have produced such a sickly son as Jack. And at one point Higgins is described as a centaur. There’s something very D.H. Lawrence about him, with him peeking over the bushes.
DV: So you’re saying there are a lot of “subtle” allusions to horseflesh?
DP: (laughs) It’s a book about horseflesh. Sort of. Kinda. It’s a weird book cloaked in a very normal book.
DV: I like that about it, though. I could be down with that. Oh, to go back to the showing/telling thing in the dialogue, so in the big showdown scene, I’m reading the actual dialogue, the stuff between quotes, and it’s perfectly fine. They’re not lighting the world on fire, but they’re getting across the characters’ viewpoints. Every single line of dialogue then is followed by three lines of what the characters are thinking. A good writer would have just put the dialogue and we would have inferred their relationships to each other, which is more fun for the reader.
DP: It’s just a different definition of good writing. It must have to be.
DV: No. Remember when we were talking about The Age of Innocence and the whole point of it was that you had to infer too much? And at some point Wharton cracks and is like, “There’s no way they’re going to get this. I’m going to have to write something down here.” If Wharton had done this, Sabine would have known that Aunt Cassie was offering her pity to humiliate her, but she only would have said, “I see.”
Sorry that we started the in-depth discussion of Early Autumn without the traditional summary to bring you up-to-speed (or for intrepid book report cheaters to one day crib). Here we go:
The 1927 Pulitzer winner Early Autumn by man-about-town Louis Bromfield looks into the lives of the Pentland clan, whose roots in their New England community stretch Pilgrim-ward. We’ve got Olivia Pentland, long-suffering wife of Anson Pentland, who’s perpetually writing a history of his family of interest to precisely no one; mother to Sylvia Pentland, dewily on the market; and the sickly Jack Pentland, a.k.a. Young Master Not-long-for-this-world. Also, there’s a bitchy aunt who’s all up in everyone’s business, a melancholy and alcoholic grandfather who is Olivia’s secret ally against the rest of the family, and a madwoman in the attic. Just your standard moneyed New England house of slow, dreary horrors.
The change agents come in the form of Sabine, a cousin (if I remember correctly) and childhood playmate of Anson’s, who returns from Europe with a tarnished reputation and a scientifically-inclined daughter of marriageable age, and John O’Hara, a “shanty Irish” up-and-coming politician who takes up residence in a nearby cottage and casts an appreciative eye in Olivia’s direction. Desire long dead in Olivia’s heart is stirred by his attentions, and she spends the bulk of the book contemplating adultery. Unfortunately, the death of her son, the elopement of her daughter Sabine with a visiting French musician, and the suicide-framed-as-accidental death of her father-in-law, the scion of the Pentland clan, forestall any actual play.
There’s a strong historical subplot in the middle of the book about Pentland ancestors who actually managed to do something genuinely scandalous, and this refracts forward and backward into Pentland family history, casting aspersions on the purity of the bloodline and generally throwing into stark tragicomic relief Aunt Cassie’s self-righteous meddling and Anson’s stony propriety. The novel ends with Olivia turning to a home now empty of her allies (father-in-law and daugher) and a future spent maintaining the stalwart bloodline and heritage for which she cares nothing.
Loius Bromfield was the man. This seems like an important thing to know about him. He did it all first: Joined the ambulence corps in WWI before America entered the war (and was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor), wrote a first novel which became a bestseller (The Green Bay Tree, two books before Early Autumn), hung out in Paris between the wars (he helped Hemmingway get his first story published), conquered Broadway (play based on his first book: smash hit), was the toast of 30s Hollywood (Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart got married in his backyard) and then retired to the country, incidentally, as it were, becoming one of the pioneers of the organic farming and ecology movements (his home, Malabar Farm, is now a state park).
I must correct myself: Louis Bromfield was the fucking man. If he’d managed to cram in a few evenings gigging with Louis Armstrong during this period, not only would you believe it, he’d be fucking Zelig.
Which makes it all the odder that I’d never heard of him. Not so much because I’d never heard of him, but because you’d think anybody would have heard of him, with a resume like that. The cat was hep. He made the scene. Cooler than Lou Reed on F.D.R. drive in February. And he won a goddamn Pulitzer. So how could he have died from literary memory so quickly?
Well, the short answer may suffice: He’s not very good. Dread Penny and I chatted a bit about this, of which more anon, but there’s something about him that reminds me a bit of Stephen Fry’s character in Cold Comfort Farm. There’s a brief scene in a tea shop that shows what I mean (two and a half minutes in, although Ian McKellen as a fire and brimstone preacher has its pleasures as well, as does the entire film and the book it’s based on):
In a slightly less spittle-flecked way, that’s Bromfield to a T. Early Autumn is a book consumed not with the actuality of sex, but with its possibility; practically everyone in it who actually does manage to knock boots is nearly destroyed by the experience, because they’re too weak, damn it, damnably weak, and lack the passionate animal spirits which lend the lower classes their pulsating vitality. Or something like that. Bromfield condemns this narrowmindedness and leads the rah-rah section for honest lust; but it all feels like a wrestling match with a scarecrow today, and one gets the vague sense that it did even back then. To wit, here’s a contemporary review of the book from the Hartford Courant:
Bromfield Not Quite Master of His Craft
The Hartford Courant
Nov 28, 1926
Here is presented to us the third “panel” in Louis Bromfield’s “screen of American life,” “The Green Bay Tree” and “Possession,” being the “panels” already unfolded to the reading public. Mr. Bromfield’s books are exceedingly difficult to criticize the author possess, indubitably, a fine talent, yet it is a talent with abrupt and daunting limitations; his imaination is acute and subtle, but he lacks the power to bring the fruits of that imagination clearly and acceptably before the reader; he has the mind, and the material, but somehow they do not fuse properly, the author is unable to work them together into a wholly satisfying narrative.
“Early Autumn” is a sad scare story of the yellow leaf; of the decadence, or better perhaps the disintegration, of an old aristocratic New England family. In an exceedingly interesting letter to his publishers, Mr. Bromfield writes of how New England, through the migration of her most vigorous citizens to the west,—“has spread over all America a thin veneer of what passes for Puritans, and is merely a pale, degenerate imitation of the positive, fighting, masculine force represented by the Roundheads of Cromwell’s day.” This is a bit of acute analytic comment, which reveals something of Mr. Bromfield’s individual idiosyncrasy.
The men and women in “Early Autumn” are drawn with patient, painstaking care, but they never come quite alive; but Mr. Bromfield does succees in conveying the sense of breaking down, of a strain bred too far, of general collapse. If only this sensitively minded writer were more completely master of his craft, if he were able to attain the height for which he manifestly strives, his work would be comparable with that of Mrs. Wharton; as it is there is, in Mr. Bromfield’s New England trilogy, a constant suggestion of Mrs. Wharton’s manner and method.
It cheers me to think at least some reviewers saw him as a bit of a soapy old fraud as well. (Of course, maybe I’m just pissed because Humph and Lauren didn’t get married in my back yard. We’ll always have Paris….) But it is startling and disturbing to think that such a prominent cultural figure could disappear so utterly. Quality, it seems, does count for something. But contemporary prize pickers don’t seem to be very good at spotting it….which makes one’s right eyebrow float aloft when looking at some more recent winners….
DP: Yeah, you’re farther than I am. I just got the book and I’m probably about twenty pages in. So they just went home from the ball. There are lots of balls.
DV: Yeah.
DP: But not those kinds of balls.
DV: Not so far.
DP: No, there are just actual… balls. Dances. There are a lot of social mores being defied in very subtle ways.
DV: “Subtle” is not the word I would use.
DP: [laughs] No, well, you know what I mean. There’s like a “sorting matches” kind of vibe about the whole thing. The most scandalous thing in the whole book so far is, like, her garish red hair.
DV: Yeah, and the fact that she, like, looks at people. She just has an air about her.
DP: And the other one, too… and honestly, their names are very close together and it’s going to bother me for the whole book. There’s a Sabine and a Sibyl and an Olivia and a Therese, but she’s only referred to once by her first name, and I already have them confused. Which is the mother and the daughter? The one sort-of cougar is too fiery in the way she looks at people and the other is just too languid in the way she looks at people. And both are very offensive.
DV: I feel like this is going to be hard to evaluate because it’s like asking “is this a good or a bad dinosaur?” I can see the movie they would have made of this in 1932, the drawing room drama with Katharine Hepburn. That’s so distinctive a genre that I can’t tell if this is a good example of it or even a good book or what.
DP: That’s been the major drama in any of these books that we’ve read about society. It’s all looking at people the wrong way or wearing a dress that’s out of date. It’s like Alice Adams without the snobbery.
DV: Or they’re actually rich.
DP: Yeah, that’s true. I did think in the beginning, “You’re [Diablevert’s] from Boston? Is this what it was like?”
DV: No! I’ve heard rumors of such, but it died over a hundred years ago. I came from the wrong side of the tracks anyway. The idea of Boston as this dying cultural center, that it would have been the “it” city of the 1800s, was slowly dying off and falling away from a leadership position. Like, that all happened a hundred years ago. You just have no concept of that now.
DP: Boston before the Red Sox, I don’t know much about.
DP: That’s right! It’s only been twenty pages and I’ve forgotten about the weird off-handed references to Emerson, which, honestly, I don’t think Emerson would want you to take his name in snootiness. That’s kind of not the point of Emerson. Also, a society in which James Russell Lowell is a mad crazy paparazzi-worthy houseguest is just difficult to…
DP: But these people aren’t particularly intellectual. I don’t think that they’re so celebratory towards Emerson because of anything that he wrote, but just his sheer celebrity, or his uppercrust-ness.
DV: I think it’s the same way that nowadays New York looks down on LA, because New Yorkers consider themselves to be smarter and more of an intellectual hotspot. I think Boston had that kind of… that weight of history happening. Maybe more the way London was. Boston’s a provincial city. It’s one of the leading provincial cities, but well behind New York, L.A., Washington.
DP: Chicago, even.
DV: Chicago’s a much bigger city. Given its size, Boston carries a lot of weight, culturally. But that makes the book tough to evaluate, because that atmosphere is kind of extinct for so long that it’s hard to tell whether it’s true or clichéd or what.
DP: Sometimes I feel like it’s not very fair of us to read these books because we’re accustomed to so much more just happening in a book. Honestly, when you compare it to the most recent Pulitzer winner, Oscar Wao, which is a very action-packed book… the history is full of sturm und drang, there’s a lot of drama, there’s a lot going on. It lives in this sea of pop culture that these older books just simply don’t. So for this major prizewinner to have the first twenty pages just be about who looked at each other wrong at a ball…
DV: But at the same time, isn’t that fucking The House of Mirth? And all Henry James?
DP: I guess this just has no air of danger. In The Age of Innocence, I felt like someone was always about have their bodice get ripped off, like we were just one step away from total utter…
[DV scoffs]
DP: OK, we were many many steps and longing glances away from someone shedding a bustle, but… these books just seem very safe to me. They’re safe, they’re traditional in plot, in style, they’re beside the point of modernism. Unless we start to go all “Moo cow” in fifty more pages, I’m like…
DV: Maybe. There was that weird D.H. Lawrence-y bit where the groom was looking into the ball.
DP: That’s right! What was up with that?
DV: I don’t know! I was, like, “where are we going with this?” Because if he turns out to be a major character, this will be pretty much like D.H. Lawrence.
DP: There’s some weird foreshadowing here. Well, from the beginning of the book (and I think we both Twittered this), we start in the first three sentences with the word “bedizened”
DV: Sidebar: “bedizened” was in the New Yorkerthis week. It’s so weird. I’d never heard that word before and now it’s twice in one week.
DP: Someone else is reading this book! Does it mean “bedazzled”?
DV: It has a musty old-timey-ness that feels forced.
DP: It is old-timey. It is like Ye Olde Vocabulary Teste.
DV: After the ball, she goes upstairs and sees her husband… have you gotten to that bit yet?
DP: No, I haven’t gotten to that bit yet. She just saw her aged father-in-law down the hallway.
DV: It’s like what you were talking about before, like watching something that’s been ripped off many times. I can’t tell whether this was a cliché at the time, but it does just feel very much like that Eddie Izzard bit. “I guess you’d better had.” I’m trying to give the book the benefit of the doubt, but I get the strong feeling that…
DP: Well, there’s the possibility that we’re not picking up on the cultural nuances in it, in that the difference between phat with a “ph” and fat with an “f”… I don’t know. That we’re sensitive to micro-distinctions in celebrity and slang that maybe there are micro-distinctions here we’re just not picking up on.
DV: (skeptically) It’s possible.
DP: I’m also a little troubled in my OCD by the fact that this is the middle book of a trilogy, so I can’t help but think that maybe there was stuff going into it that we should know from the book prior. We’re gonna have this problem later when we get to the Rabbit books in that the first one or two Rabbit books did not win a Pulitzer but the second two did.
DV: Well, I’ve read Rabbit, Run. It’s funny: there was a review that I read this week about how you can’t understand that book until you’re the age that Rabbit is and realizing that your life is not going to amount to a whole lot. So part of me wonders if I’d feel differently about it now.
DP: (vehemently) I hate that book. I hate all of those books.
DV: Rabbit was such a jackass. That’s the problem with Updike: that you were supposed to feel bad for these people who treated other people like shit because they’re all confused and lonesome and things didn’t work out like they thought they would. But that does not give you an acceptable excuse to ditch your wife and baby and leave them in a depression spiral. That’s like, “No, you’re an asshole. I’m sorry.” Or, you couldn’t play basketball to make a career out of it, but that does not give you free abandon to be an ass.
DP: Well, it’s that kind of egotism and that sort of attention to Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea that he didn’t live up to his expectations so he gets free rein to be a wreck of a person and wreck all these other lives. Updike was essentially writing about these reprehensible people doing reprehensible things. It’s just not fun for me.
DV: But he doesn’t acknowledge that they’re reprehensible. They’re supposed to be lost and confused and sympathetic. That’s what gets me.
DP: I don’t know if this is going to be the same issue, to read this award-winning middle book of a trilogy will somehow be less fulfilling, mostly because I have the three-volume edition. So I will be reading the other two books out of sheer OCD. So pray for me. It’s also hard for me, because I like to judge books by their covers, and as we delve into the Pulitzer back archives in the dusty stacks in Central [Library], you can’t judge rebound library books by their covers.
DV: Some small press reissued this, I found out when I was looking for a cover image of the book. I was talking to L. about starting a new book, and she said “Yeah, you just don’t like any of those, huh?”
DP: I liked The Age of Innocence. And even So Big, a little bit.
DV: I get a sinking feeling that this book is going to be terrible.
DP: Or Booth Tarkington-esque.
DV: I don’t think it will be Booth Tarkington, because it seems to take itself a little too seriously. Tarkington had that Midwestern thing.
DP: There’s something sort of burnished and golden about this book.
DV: Booth Tarkington did that thing where he could make a pastiche of that to make fun of it, but he couldn’t do it for real. I mean, nobody does it realer than Edith Wharton. Booth Tarkington could have never written The Age of Innocence, because he was too much of a middle-class soul. Which sound fucked up to say, but whatever.
DP: I hear you. He was so class-bound that he could only see wealth from…
DV: … an outsider’s perspective. Which is normal, but Tarkington was just such a piece of shit.
DP: I guess we’d have to know more about Bromfield to know categorically if he’s writing from experience or not.
DV: I don’t think he is. The sense I get of it (after not reading much of it, to be sure) is if I tried to do an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. I wouldn’t know dick about what it was like to live the life of a rich millionaire in the 20s, other than what I’ve read about it. It feels clichéd like that. But it’s hard to tell because this whole genre is so dead-and-gone that it’s hard to say.
