caracolina

“Arrowsmith” brings us the life and times of Martin Arrowsmith: from boyhood to College and Medical School, then marriage, and various attempts at finding a good position and making a career. Which makes this a long book. Too long for me. There are so many chapters in Martin’s life and each one is written in lavish detail. There are a lot of good things, satirical views of the medical profession in general as well as snarky comments about the necessity to choose between becoming a physician who sees patients, a medical professional at the health department, or research scientist with an eye on the next big discovery that will save the life of millions – and garner fame and fortune. And all the while poor Arrowsmith would love nothing better than be left alone in his laboratory.

I grew tired of all the twists and turns in the story because ultimately I did not get a feeling for Martin at all. He seemed like a pawn that got pushed from one square to the next. There are a huge number of supporting characters and all of them feel like cardboard cutouts. There seemed to be a lot of similarities to “Babbitt,” another famous book by Sinclair Lewis, which I could not finish because I loathed the shallowness of the main character. Sometimes authors can overdo getting their point across.

Things turned around to an extent when Arrowsmith and his wife travel to a tropical island that is ravaged by the plague, in the hopes of applying Martin’s research to saving the population from disease and death. Things all of a sudden “get real”, as they say. The tension mounts and tragedy strikes. This experience allowed the character of Martin Arrowsmith to mature in my eyes. He tries one more time to work within the medical research establishment before giving up on that life and moving into a smalltime lab where he is finally able to concentrate on what he loves best – research.

Note: This book was supposed to get a Pulitzer Prize but Sinclair Lewis declined it. Lewis has been quoted as not being convinced that the Pulitzer criteria were valid:

All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards: they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

Those terms are that the prize shall be given “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment. (taken from: http://english.illinoisstate.edu/sinclairlewis/sinclair_lewis/faq/faq2.shtml)

I find this quote interesting because I have not been able to find much information about the judging criteria elsewhere. Admittedly, whenever I hear the term “wholesome” I also hear “staid and boring,” so I can relate to this explanation. On the other hand, Lewis’ attitude towards the Pulitzer might have been skewed because he already had been nominated twice for “Main Street” and “Babbitt” but lost out to “The Age of Innocence” and “One of Ours”. Maybe he was just bitter at that point. In the end, he gladly received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.

“The Bridge of San Luis Rey” was a book I enjoyed a lot. It was refreshingly different from the books I read so far. The first part of the book takes the reader to Peru in 1714. A bridge collapses and kills the five people that happened to cross it at that moment. A monk, Brother Juniper wonders if the collapse was an accident or divine intervention and wants to find out everything he can about these victims, to see if they were sinners or what other reasons there may have been that God wanted them to die. He compiles his findings in book form.

The next parts of the books are the life stories of the victims of the bridge collapse. A noble woman and her young female servant, a young man, an old man accompanying a boy. As the lives unfold before us it becomes clear that they all connect somewhere. However, what is just as clear is that none of these people deserved to die. While none of them was a saint, there also was no criminal or extraordinary sinner. And this is what Brother Juniper is getting to realize. Since merely questioning God’s reason is heresy back in the day, he soon suffers the deadly consequences of his honestly well-intended quest. At the end we are left with the few people who knew the victims of the collapse – the mother of the young boy, the daughter of the noble woman, the abbess of the convent where several of the travelers were headed. They come to the conclusion that our lives really do not matter in any other way than how we affect those around us.

I liked the well constructed live stories. The idea that someone would review a person’s life to determine if they “deserved to die” is an interesting concept. It certainly drives home the point that we could go at any time and the only thing we can try to do is live well. Compared to the other Pulitzer books so far this was definitely the most thought-provoking.

When I started reading “Early Autumn” my first thought was “‘Age of Innocence’ all over again!’ There are too many similarities. Upper class family – check! Female Cousin returns from overseas after dissolution of marriage – check! Said cousin is considered immoral by conservative family members – check! Love triangle – check! But I read on, wondering how this book would differ from Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel .

For one, the story takes place in New England and involves a the Pentland family who go all the way back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Then, our protagonist is female this time around, so her love interest is not the cousin (a little too progressive?), but the neighbor, an Irish businessman, considered unworthy and an upstart by the upper-crust Pentlands. Olivia Pentland, 40-year-old mother of two and wife of John Pentland who is more interested in the family history book he’s working on than his wife and children, is forced to consider what is more important – her own happiness or the family name. It takes a while for Olivia to discover the feelings the neighbor has for her, but I saw it coming from a mile away. And sadly, this lowered the book towards romance novel stuff for me. I raced through the remaining pages wondering “is she or isn’t she???” (This is when I wonder if I should give the ending away. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t)

What I liked about the book: the description of the Pentland family and their home paints a picture of a haunted house, that was well done. But besides that, the story felt predictable and the ending was a letdown (you probably have guessed now how it ends anyway).

“So Big” was another sojourn into farming life, but this time with none of the nostalgia. After the death of her beloved father in 1888, Selina Peake, an educated but poor 19-year-old woman from the Chicago area, is an orphan with no prospects. To make ends meet she takes the school teacher position in High Prairie, a farming town mostly populated by Dutch settlers. Selina stays with the Pool family and quickly finds out how harsh life on the farm is, not because she is lacking food, but because people around her are distant and rather cold. They don’t appreciate her sophistication and sense of beauty. The only person she finds a connection with is Roelf Pool, the Pool’s 12-year-old son who had to quit school to work the farm full-time. Selina encourages him to read her novels and pursue his wood carving hobby.

Eventually, Selina marries the widower Pervus de Jong and they have a son Dirk (“So Big” is Dirk’s nick name). Life on the farm with Pervus is a source of seemingly never ending toil. Although she has read about new methods that could improve the farm’s yield, Pervus refuses to try any of Selina’s suggestions. He gets sick and dies and leaves her and 4-year-old Dirk behind. Because Selina is a woman she can’t manage things such as selling the harvest. Men will not accept her as business partner, so things are starting to look even more grim. By sheer coincidence Selina then runs into a friend from her youth who is well off. The friend’s father can see Selina’s determination and likes her ideals. He helps her out with a loan and that get things rolling. Fast forward in time and Selina’s is becoming quite successful so that Dirk can go to good schools and study architecture – and he hangs out with shallow high society friends. After working as an architect for a while Dirk changes tracks and against his mother’s will becomes a stock broker because he can make more money that way. In the end this decision leaves him disappointed, when he realizes that in spite of all the wealth, his life is dull and meaningless.

What I liked:

The book is well-written and the descriptions of hard life on the farm ring true. It is interesting that in the beginning, High Prairie (not sure if this is a fictional name or if there ever was a town or village with this name)  seems to be way out in the middle of nowhere, but at the end of the book it is much closer to Chicago because the big city has grown so much and is swallowing up the surrounding farm lands.

What I didn’t like:

Selina is way too angelic. She is pretty (in her own way), always cheerful and positive, smart, too good to be true in other words. She might as well wear a halo. But on the other hand she ultimately was not able to save herself and Dirk. For that she needed some crazy coincidence so that a friend’s father could give her a loan. That coincidence part was unbelievable. It felt to me as if the author had cheated and allowed Selina a short-cut instead of  giving her the ability to come up with the money without “connections”. And then, the ending. I felt bad for Dirk because it was never quite clear what kind of person he was. It was obvious that he did not have Selina’s sense of the aesthetic and artistic streak. Maybe he had inherited this lack from his father? I never had the sense that he cut off a promising architectural career in favor of cold, hard cash. Rather that he did not feel passionate about architecture. Why should he feel guilty about not fulfilling his mother’s dream? After all, she was the one who married a dull farmer who was her complete opposite – why should she be surprised that her son was more like his father than herself?

The Able Mclaughlins is a story about several families of devoutly religious Scottish immigrants on the lonely Iowa prairie just after the civil war. Young Wully McLaughlin returns from the war ready to marry his sweetheart Chirstie McNair when he finds out that she has been “shamed” by Wully’s cousin Peter. In other words, she has been raped and is pregnant. He threatens the cousin to leave and never return or else and then hurriedly marries Chirstie to save her reputation. When her pregnancy shows too soon after the wedding it becomes clear what is going on and Wully’s mother in particular is unhappy because she assumes that her son is to blame for Chirstie’s condition. She does stick with Wully though and everything is fine when the baby boy is born, who turns out to be a particularly bonny child. As the boy is about a year old though, Peter returns. He shows up at Wully and Chirstie’s house while Chirstie is alone and frightens her so that she almost has a nervous breadown. Wully is besides himself and goes off to confront him but Peter has disappeared again, apparently on the way to his parent’s house. The community sets out to search for Peter which makes for some awkward situations because other than Wully’s parents (Chirstie eventually broke down and told her mother-in-law the real reason for her pregnancy) nobody knows what Peter has done while Wully is entertaining furious thoughts of revenge. After several days of searching Peter is given up on and life goes back to normal. Some time later, Wully and Chirstie unexpectedly find him, but he is sick and dying. At first Wully is so incensed that he wants to abandon him to die alone, but eventually he reconciles himself to the extent that he is able to bring the sick man home to die.

I enjoyed this book, I got through it in just a few days because I wanted to know how it would end. It does have a nostalgic and one-dimensional feel to it though, like an old movie from the 40s or 50s.

One of Ours was an interesting step into the mind of a Nebraska country boy. Claude Wheeler grows up on a successful farm near Frankfort in the beginning of the 20th century and attends college in a larger town. Claude likes working on the farm but does not see himself as belonging there for the rest of his life. His father however is oblivious to his son’s thoughts and orders him to quit school to work the farm full-time. Claude concedes, unhappily, but decides to make the best of it. He falls in love with a childhood friend Enid and proposes, in spite of her lack of enthusiasm. Again Claude finds himself utterly defeated. All his expectations of a loving home are disappointed and he falls into depression.

Meanwhile, World War I has broken out in Europe and as the United States enter the fighting, Claude volunteers. In the beginning of the second half of the story we find him on a troop transport ship en route to France as an influenza epidemic breaks out. The weeks at sea turn gruesome while soldier after soldier succumbs. Claude arrives unharmed and we follow him around France while he realizes that in spite of the horrible circumstances, he is finally content with his life.

I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second, and not necessarily because the latter revolved around war and tragedy. The descriptions of Claude’s environments and thoughts were so vivid and I could relate to his loneliness and frustrations. Between his decision to join the service and the continuation of the story on the ship there seems to be a big gap though. It felt as if the second part of the book was written by someone else. The time on the ship was still good, but once Claude arrives in France the story lost focus. He keeps meeting new people, gets moved here and there, has some battle experience, but as reader I no longer felt like I had insight into his mind. The book moved to its inevitable conclusion but I no longer cared. Too bad.

Of the Pulitzers of the 1920s, Edith Warton’s The Age of Innocence is probably the best known, because of Martin Scorsese’s film with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder. Also notable is that this was the first time the prize was awarded to a woman.

The story takes place in New York’s high society of the late 19th century. At the beginning, Newland Archer is set to marry May, a young girl of a good family. However, fate throws him a major curveball in the shape of May’s exotic cousin Countess Ellen Olenska, who returns to New York to escape her unhappy marriage with an abusive Polish count. She is a woman of the world and very independent, as opposed to May who is – as is expected – an innocent virgin. Ellen gets in trouble for wanting a divorce from her husband (the scandal!), but Newland, as a lawyer is tasked by the family to talk her out of it and manages to persuade her not to, saving the family’s reputation. Over several conversations, Newland realizes how much more interesting Ellen is compared to the pretty but bland May and falls in love with the countess (and she with him), but the wedding plans with May are already underway… what to do?

The entanglement between a heart’s desire and duty is the subject of many classic novels and they usually don’t have happy endings. Not that I would want a happy ending, but there’s also no surprise here, really. My modern self got annoyed with Newland several times because he could not make a clear break with Ellen or May. He was so torn between ideals and self-fulfillment but, of course, in the end chose to do what was expected after all. What I enjoyed much more than the back-and-forth of Newland’s heart were the rich (no pun intended) descriptions of opulent New York’s wheelings and dealings in the Gilded Age. Wharton really has a gift of language; there is a lot of sumptous detail about society rules, living spaces, manners, dress and the sardonic tone is so much fun. I got The Age of Innocence as audio book and I only regret that this did not allow me to copy some passages as example.

In other words, I enjoyed this book very much, but the love story part was not as interesting to me as hearing about the surroundings. I can’t say I would read (or listen to) it again.

I got to skip 1920 because there was no winner chosen that year. 1921′s winner was Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” which I borrowed as audio book, but I am not done with it yet. I did finish “Alice Adams” though, which I managed to snag as a free Kindle download from Amazon.com. It was another story that takes a critical look at American society. This time the reader gets to meet Alice Adams, a young woman of a lower middle class background in a small midwestern town. Her family is trying to “keep up with the Joneses” but it doesn’t quite work out that way. Alice’s dad Virgil just does not make enough money working for J.A. Lamb’s large company as some sort of clerk.

When Alice is invited to another girl’s ball, Mrs. Adams and Alice have to fix up an old dress as much as they can and Alice has to pick her own flowers in the heat (oh my!) because they can’t afford to buy any. Alice does not seem to mind too much, but her mother is besides herself. She insists they could be doing so much better if her husband would quit his desk job and go into business for himself. At the ball it is clear that Alice is not popular with the other girls, they look down on her. I should mention that Alice never complains; she tries to make the best of things, but at times she sounded so naive and positive about the girls’ arrogant behavior that I was wondering if she was putting on a brave face or was just clueless.

The ball is pretty bleak for Alice although she gets to dance with a popular young man who is new in town and not aware of Alice’s pariah status. They meet again later and he tries to pursue her in spite of her polite dismissiveness (she knows there’s no real chance of her marrying him). Meanwhile, Alice’s parents attempt in various scheming ways to improve the family’s status in the hopes of raising her odds.

They do this in such clumsy ways that it was clear to me there was going to be no happy couple at the end. Instead, Alice opts for a new path in life – job training for a career as an office worker. Apparently an option that was not readily accepted at the time, or at least not by Alice’s family because earlier in the book she herself had been judgmental about girls in that line of work.

It really was odd; while her social climber mother was obsessing about getting her daughter married off to a wealthy guy, Alice herself seemed strangely oblivious, as if she did not really care what was going to happen to her. (Come to think of it, so was her father, until pressured into action by his wife’s rants.) The options for a woman to take care of herself without getting married, such as governess or teacher (or secretary), were apparently deemed as “too low”, but Alice was not upset either way – no complaints, no fretting about her future as if there was no worry. I really did get the idea sometimes she was a bit dense.

In the end, Alice’s family felt like a bunch of cardboard cutouts. Maybe that was on purpose, as comic relief? Sadly, it didn’t work for me. This book is what I would call a “fluff read,” very quick, and not all that great in my eyes. I liked that Alice in the end “emancipates” herself from her family’s old-fashioned ideals but that was too little too late.

Ernest Poole’s “His Family” was the very first book to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for Best Novel (it wasn’t called “Fiction” then). It is available free of charge for the Kindle on Amazon. Similar to the “Magnificent Ambersons” this is a story about change at the beginning of the 20th centry, but handled from a different perspective. It is told from the point of view of a wealthy widower, Roger Gale, who lives in New York and who has three adult daughters: Edith, the oldest, only lives for her husband and children, Deborah, the middle daughter, runs a school in a poor neighborhood and that’s all she cares about. Although she is in love with someone who loves her, she keeps postponing marriage because of her work. Laura, the youngest, only cares about her own happiness.

The book begins shortly before World War One and we get many glimpses into life in New York City both for the upper classes and poor at that time. Roger, prompted by Deborah, visits her school and the crowded tenements in immigrant neighborhoods. A gentle soul, he wants to help his own family as well as “her family”, the impoverished children, but then tragedy strikes and war breaks out.

That said, it might sound strange, but there isn’t a lot of drama in this book. It is a really quick read – it took me less than a week and I don’t get much time in for reading. Whenever some conflict is brewing (especially between the daughters, they don’t see eye-to-eye on many things) it is soon resolved, and while things become dire and money is tight, it doesn’t take too long before the economy is improving again. I did like the flow of the narration which has a nostalgic and sometimes wistful tone to it. And the descriptions of those noisy and lively neighborhoods were very interesting.

This concludes the 1910s for fiction! On to the 1920s with “Alice Adams” by Booth Tarkington.

A tough book for me to get through, even as an audio book (Blackstone Audio, wonderfully read by Geoffrey Blaisdell, courtesy of Overdrive Digital Library). This book won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 1919, the second one ever awarded. It describes the fall of what might be described as an aristocratic family in a fictitious town in Indiana. The main character, George “Georgie” Amberson Minafer is an intolerably pompous ass for most of the story. His mother in particular, but the rest of the family as well, indulge and spoil him right into college age  while the townspeople can’t wait for him to get his “comeuppance”. I knew we were getting prepared for the inevitable downfall. On top of all that George is so obtuse that he kept drawing the wrong (selfish) conclusion to nearly all challenges he was confronted with, it was almost comical. Unfortunately this made George so unlikeable that I was beginning to lose interest in the book altogether. Being able to spin yarn for John’s gloves helped me stick with it.

And to my surprise, I ended up enjoying the Magnificent Ambersons after all. Yes, George messes up to the highest degree, ruining several people’s chance at happiness, and tragedy strikes the whole family. Then, after losing everything he has an epiphany, George finally gains maturity (almost a little to quickly) and gets to redeem himself to an extent. But what will stay in my mind about this book is how Tarkington describes the end of an era that predates “modern times”. We see the introduction of the automobile into rural society, how the “old guard” stubbornly sticks to the horse drawn carriage and all the other trappings of the good old days, how the cities change from big mansions to apartment buildings and tenement housing, the beginnings of suburban sprawl, pollution and so on. Far from succumbing to nostalgia though, Tarkington manages to describe this process in a way that is neutral – while some parties (such as the Ambersons) lose, some win, riches are made, new technologies make life easier and more affordable for many. Considering the book was written in 1918 this changeover had happened relatively recently!

I also enjoyed the style of the book, there is a lot of sardonic wit. Here is an sample quote that I found in an Amazon review that perfectly illustrates Tarkington’s literary style:

Mrs. Johnson came in, breathing noticeably: and her round head, smoothly but economically decorated with the hair of an honest woman, seemed to be lingering far in the background of the Alpine Bosom which took precedence of the rest of her everywhere.

Warning: There is some racist language in this book when referring to servants. It made me cringe but does not take away from the main themes of the book.

I’m looking forward to reading another Tarkington novel as part of my Pulitzer project – Alice Adams, winner of 1922′s award, but I could also see myself returning to the Ambersons, since the Magnificent Ambersons is the middle book of the Growth trilogy. The first part, The Turmoil, was published in 1915, and the last part part National Avenue was published in 1927. However, for now I’m moving on to His Family by Ernest Poole, which I found on Amazon as a free Kindle book. It was the Pulitzer Prize winner of 1918 and with that I will have the 1910s complete (only 1918 and 1919 were award years).