Pulitzer Project: The Town

Like most of the books I've read as part of my Pulitzer project, The Town was a book I'd never heard of written by an author whose name sounded vaguely familiar but with whose work I was completely unfamiliar. I had a faint recollection of having seen books by Conrad Richter on library shelves but I was reasonably sure I'd never read any of them. If The Town is typical of his work, I may be feeling relieved.

That's actually an odd thing to say because The Town was definitely readable. I picked it up at the library on Tuesday and finished it last night: three evenings' worth of reading comes close to dropping into mind candy territory. Unlike some of the other "classics" I've had to struggle through, The Town did not feel like work. It just felt . . . lame.

I'll explain, but first a brief overview of the book. The Town is the final installment in a trilogy that included The Trees and The Fields. The three books chronicle the lives of a pioneer family that left the eastern United States at about the time of the American Revolution and settled in Ohio. The first book apparently details their arrival in the wilderness, the second one gets into their efforts at farming, and by book three civilization has arrived. The little settlement that began with just one family progresses from being a village to a town to an actual city and the county seat. The Town is told through the perspective of three members of the Wheeler family: Sayward Wheeler, the middle-aged wife of an attorney (Portius Wheeler), their youngest child, Chancey Wheeler, and Rosa Tench, the illegitimate daughter of Portius Wheeler. Chancey and Rosa are approximately the same age. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination for the reader to figure out where that particular story line is going to lead, especially when neither child seems to be particularly grounded in reality. There's a lot of tiptoeing around and dropping of various hints, but no adult seems to have brains enough to simply say in plain English, hey, young idiots, you're brother and sister. Naturally, by the time anyone does come right out and tell them why they shouldn't be hanging out together and acting like they're courting, the damage has been done and the inevitable tragedy results.

Of course, if anyone had bothered to be blunt with Chancey and Rosa when they were still young, the book would have been a lot shorter.

In addition to spending multiple chapters hinting at the risk of an incestuous love affair, the book looks at life from the perspective of Sayward Wheeler, the self-styled "woodsy" girl who likes to think of herself as a simple pioneer but ends up being the richest person in town as well as mother of the governor of the state. She's annoyed when her husband talks her into selling off pieces of the farmland she inherited from her parents so that the town can grow and a canal can be built, and she's also annoyed when Portius insists they build a good brick house and move out of the simple log cabin she'd spent most of her life in. When the book begins, Sayward has hit menopause. She's borne nine children and, at the ancient age of approximately 40, is wondering if she's going to live long enough to see her youngest and frailest son, Chancey, survive past childhood. She does, of course. She doesn't die until the eve of the Civil War. Along the way she finds her sister who had been lost in the woods decades earlier and had been presumed dead, sees one of her daughters end up married to an English aristocrat, and watches most of her other children grow up to be successful adults who marry and provide her with grandchildren.

Conrad Richter reportedly engaged in exhaustive research while writing this book and the others in the trilogy. He reviewed hundreds of documents to get a sense for the speech patterns and dialects of the early 19th century. His work has been praised for the accuracy of its portrayals of frontier life and folkways.

So why, if the book was well-researched and decently written, was I left with an overall impression of "meh"? Maybe it was the totally cliched incest subplot. Maybe it was the folksy way Sayward expressed herself -- maybe it was accurate, but it also came across as twee. Not as bad as some books that lay the colorful dialect on with a trowel, but still not quite believable. It was just a tad too cute. Or maybe it was all the weird names too many of the characters have. Did people back in early 19th century Ohio really pick names every bit as odd as some of the brain-dead names we see today? A couple of the Wheeler kids have normal names but "Sooth" and "Dezia" aren't among them. I can accept that some names were just misspelled versions of common names -- Jary instead of Gerry or Jerry, for example -- but there are limits.

Okay. Where do I rank this one? Right in the middle of the pack. It didn't stink, it was quite readable, and it wasn't work. On the other hand, it also didn't particularly impress me. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's probably a 5. Would I recommend it to other readers? Not really. I'd have to throw in a bunch of qualifiers. You know, "It's easy reading but it's too cliched." "It's easy reading but the characters aren't really believable." Etc.

Next up on the list: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. That is a book I have heard of. In fact, the book is so well-known that I was sure the L'Anse Public Library would have it in its collection. Nope. All those Danielle Steeles must take up too much shelf space because this is still another novel I have to order through Interlibrary Loan. I am happy to have a local public library, but, holy wah, there's a lot of low quality dreck taking up way too much space on its shelves.

Pulitzer Project: All the King's Men

The last few prize winners I've read had been, to put it kindly, duds. My expectations for All the King's Men were accordingly low. I had somehow forgotten (or never realized) that the author, Robert Penn Warren, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. His other two prizes were for poetry. It shows.

All the King's Men flows despite -- or, more accurately, because of -- all the things the author does wrong. It's loaded with run-on sentences that should make a card carrying member of the grammar police run screaming in horror but instead mesmerize the reader. Where was his editor? How on earth did he get away with constructing paragraphs that fill pages but are essentially one long sentence that just keeps flowing and flowing until you've been sucked in like a fallen magnolia leaf being slowly but surely washed to the Gulf by an autumnal Louisiana rain? It doesn't matter. You've been sucked in, you're as trapped by Penn Warren's words as his protagonist Jack Burden was by politician Willie Stark's charisma.

All the King's Men was heavily influenced by the career of Louisiana politician Huey "Kingfish" Long. Long was a populist who was elected to the governorship of Louisiana in 1928. For generations Louisiana politics had been controlled by big money -- the oil industry, railroads, logging, sugar and cotton plantations. Long went up against them all, courted the votes of the ordinary voters, and managed to shake up the established political machine. After becoming governor, he undertook an ambitious public works program that improved roads throughout the state, constructed public hospitals, and built a new state capitol building. To the man on the street Long was a hero. To the disgruntled political operatives and business interests, of course, he was anathema. He cleaned out one political machine and replaced it with his own.

In 1930, while still serving as Governor, Long ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat from Louisiana. Even after leaving the governorship, however, Long continued to lobby the state legislature and senate to pass bills he believed in. In 1935 Long was in the state capitol building pushing for a redistricting bill. He was shot by the son-in-law of a judge who would have lost his position had the measure passed. Long died in the hospital two days later.

In All the King's Men politician Willie Stark follows a similar career trajectory with just enough differences for Penn Warren to be able to claim that although Long's story may have been an inspiration it wasn't an exact model. Long married a stenographer and had multiple children; Willie Stark marries a school teacher and has only one child. Long was elected twice to a state-wide office before winning the governorship; Stark's first political office is at the county level and doesn't last long. Long was elected to the U.S. Senate and served almost a full term before dying; Stark is gunned down while still serving as Governor.

The story overall is told from the perspective of Jack Burden, a former journalist who is asked by Stark to join his staff as an aide and researcher. Burden had trained as a historian and then worked as a reporter. When Stark wants to find people's secrets, he has Burden do the research. As Stark tells Burden, you never need to make up lies about an opponent because there is always a truth that will be more damaging:

And [Stark] said, 'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.'  

And he told me to dig it out, dig it up, the dead cat with patches of fur still clinging to the tight, swollen, dove-gray hide. It was the proper job for me, for, as I have said, I was once a student of history. A student of history does not care what he digs out of the ash pile, the midden, the sublunary dung heap, which is the human past. He doesn't care whether it is the dead pussy or the Kohinoor diamond. So it was a proper assignment for me, an excursion into the past.

Everyone has secrets, things that they don't want the world to know. All you have to do is find out what those secrets are. Some secrets can destroy you, some secrets can set you free. The secret in All the King's Men is that even though you begin the novel thinking the story is about Willie Stark and the use and abuse of power, by the time you get to the end you know it's actually Jack Burden's story and the secrets he uncovers about his own life.

All the King's Men was made into a 1949 film starring Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark. I have not seen the film, but based on the synopsis provided by Wikipedia, the plot line of the film deviated considerably from the narrative of the book. It won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress. A 2006 version starring Sean Penn apparently followed the novel much more faithfully but flopped with the critics and the public. It more than broke even at the box office, but not by much. Although a few critics praised it, the overall consensus was that it was "agonizingly dull" and "strangely lifeless." Both are available as DVDs through Netflix; maybe if they show up as streamable movies I'll try watching one or the other.

How would I rate this book? On a scale of 1 to 10, it gets an 11. I loved the wordsmithing, the long, convoluted sentences that rolled on and on, the imagery ("the bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve"), the narrative threads and subplots twisting and coiling and turning back on themselves as one secret unfolded to reveal another. The Willie Stark story line is a straight forward one -- power corrupts and karma's a bitch -- but the structure Penn Warren built around it is remarkably complex.

Next up on the list? Tales of the South Pacific, which I know I've read before but am feeling the urge to re-read. 

Pulitzer Project: Journey in the Dark

It's confession time. This was another Pulitzer winner that I flat out could not finish. I've reached an age where I figure life is too short to waste time on books that feel like work, and this one fell into that category for me.

It is a little odd that I found it unreadable. Martin Flavin was a competent wordsmith -- the book is well-written -- but Journey in the Dark just felt flat, very one dimensional. It was easy reading, but I just couldn't get into it. I made it through about the first third of the book, and that was that.

The book follows the life of Sam Braden from his impoverished childhood through adulthood. It's a classic rags-to-riches story. Braden's family is desperately poor. His mother came from a good family, but she married a man who was good at charming people but not at all interested in work. It's pretty clear the guy was a self-centered narcissist who really didn't care much for his wife or his kids. Sam's mother is the classic literary saint: she keeps food on the table by working as a seamstress and then dies tragically, slowly wasting away for years and then finally dying when Sam is 15.

Like most children, Sam was blissfully unaware just how desperately poor his family was until he was in elementary school. He then has a couple eye-opening experiences and makes the leap fairly quickly from baffled naivete (Why didn't he get the nice sled he wanted for Christmas?) to seething resentment. He becomes fixated on the richest girl in town while sneaking off to bang a mulatto girl who's been his friend since early childhood. Predictably, the colored girl gets pregnant -- although that fact is never made explicit in the book -- and disappears from the story line for awhile, having been quietly shipped off to visit her ailing grandmother for a few months. Sam is so fixated on the unattainable object of his desire that he barely notices that the girl who actually liked him is gone.

And right about there I gave up. I'd figured out I didn't much care what happened with the main character of the book and all the others were drawn so shallowly that I didn't much care about them either. Maybe I'm a shallow reader, but one of my criteria for what I like to read is that I have to care a little about what happens to the characters. I have to be engaged -- and Journey in the Dark failed to engage me. I don't have to like a character -- I can be quietly rooting for someone to get hit by a bus; I don't require a happy ending -- but I do have to care a little one way or the other.

I'm not sure what I'd say if someone asked me if this book is worth reading. It's gotten good reviews on Good Reads so obviously some readers liked it. I just happen to not be one of them.  

Pultizer Project: Dragon's Teeth

Dragon's Teeth is the third in a series of eight novels Upton Sinclair wrote chronicling the life of his fictional hero Lanny Budd. Published in 1942 as World War II was intensifying, the novel is set in Europe during the 1930s and describes Adolf Hitler's rise to power from the perspective of one small group of people: Lanny, his immediate family, and his close friends. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel in 1943.

When the novel opens, the Roaring Twenties are winding down and Lanny is pacing nervously in the waiting room of a French hospital while anticipating the birth of his first child. Other than anxiety about the ordeal his wife is experiencing, he seemingly doesn't have a care in the world. The son of a wealthy American gun manufacturer, he's spent most of his life in Europe. His mother, a beautiful socialite, apparently left his father to live with a French artist when Lanny was quite young. As a result, Lanny is far more cosmopolitan than the typical American. He's fluent in multiple languages and has also been fortunate enough to move in social circles where he became acquainted with some of the leading intellectuals and political figures of the time. Several times in the novel, for example, Lanny mentions having been present as a staff aide at the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, no doubt because of his language skills.

The novel is vague about how Lanny spent the decade between the Versailles negotiations and his first child's birth, but somewhere along the line he did manage to acquire an extremely wealthy wife. Lanny's father is well-to-do; Lanny's wife is a multimillionaire, the equivalent of a Vanderbilt. The marriage had apparently been semi-arranged by mutual friends. The courtship period was brief, the marriage sudden, and the pregnancy completely unplanned. Nonetheless, when the book opens, they're happy. They're infatuated with each other and overjoyed at being new parents. They're both content to drift contentedly, one day running into another on the French Riviera. The only annoyance for Irma is that Lanny has "Red" tendencies. Politically, he's a socialist and supports a  worker's school in the town where they live in the south of France. Irma flat out doesn't want to be bothered with politics. She doesn't want to think about political theories, she doesn't want to hear about downtrodden workers, and for sure she doesn't want anything to interfere with her continuing to live the life she's always enjoyed, a life that includes lots of parties and designer gowns and someone else being available to diaper the baby. Her idea of the perfect life is one that revolves around associating with the "smart set" and not worrying at all about petty details like just how much the maids are getting paid.

As for Lanny, although he's enjoying married life, he finds himself becoming increasingly bored and restless. He doesn't like the idea of living off his wife's money -- he wants to be an art dealer, even if it's just to sell his dead stepfather's old painting. He'd also like to spend more time hanging out with musicians and intellectuals playing good music and arguing political theory. He fears he may be what his less affluent socialist friends would consider a parasite, a useless slacker who's contributing nothing to society.

Things continue to drift amiably for a year or two, although there are intimations of bad things to come. Lanny and Irma travel to Berlin to visit Lanny's sister's in-laws, a wealthy Jewish family. Lanny is worried about the increasing influence of Hitler and the Nazis -- he's read Mein Kampf so has a clear idea of how Hitler feels about a number of subjects -- but everyone he talks with scoffs at the notion that Hitler could ever achieve any real power. Besides, even if he did, the wealthy classes in Germany, both the industrialists and the landed gentry, would keep him in line. Because of Lanny's connections and his expertise in art, he eventually is granted the honor of private meetings with the Fuhrer as well as socializing with Goering and Goebbels. Goering even invites Lanny to spend a weekend hunting with him at Goering's Bavarian lodge. The more he sees, the more worried he becomes, and he urges Johannes Rabinowicz (his sister's father-in-law) to take steps to protect himself. Persecution of the Jews has begun, but Johannes believes his wealth and his connections will protect him.

He's wrong, of course, and the second half of the book focuses on Lanny's attempts to help Johannes and his family. At the same time, the evidence is mounting that his wife is a shallow bitch who doesn't care about anyone but herself, although Lanny doesn't recognize that fact nearly as quickly as readers will. When she refuses to believe the Nazis are as bad as Lanny says, he ascribes her disbelief to her basic goodness rather than the fact she simply doesn't want to bothered with anything that doesn't revolve around her. If it was up to Irma, Johannes and his entire family could go to the ovens and she wouldn't blink an eye. She views his concern about people he's been friends with for many years as an inexplicable irritation -- after all, why should he care about them when they're just Jews? I kept hoping Lanny would wake up, smell the coffee, and DTMFA, but it didn't happen in this book. [I may read the next one in the series just in the hopes of seeing the two of them in divorce court.]

The book ends shortly after the Night of Long Knives, the bloody purge of Ernst Roehm and his Brown Shirt  followers from the Nazis. By then, Lanny has seen enough of the inside workings of the Nazis to know that there is no way he can avoid doing everything he can to help German Jews, Socialists, and other victims of persecution escape from Germany. Irma, in contrast, is dismayed that Lanny won't drop his silly interest in helping other people and pay attention to her and her alone.

One of the intriguing things about the book was seeing some of the parallels between events in the 1930s and  the tactics and language employed by the extreme right-wing today. Back in the 1930s, the Nazis kept hammering away at Jews and other non-Aryans as being the cause of all of Germany's problems until eventually enough of the populace bought it and then when the atrocities began, no one objected too loudly. Today Mexicans and Muslims get demonized, and too many people believe the lies -- Mexicans are stealing jobs or all Muslims are terrorists. Under Hitler, workers had their union rights stripped and anyone who tried to organize labor was called an enemy of the state and sent to a concentration camp. We're not imprisoning labor leaders now, but one by one all the workers' rights are being erased. The right wing in the U.S. is trying to do incrementally what Hitler did in one fell swoop, but of course Hitler had an advantage -- he was a charismatic leader who believed his own propaganda.

When Sinclair talks about people not believing what's happening even when it's right in front of them, he could be writing today. Through the character of Lanny, he describes it being clear to any intelligent observer that Hitler and a number of his cronies were batshit crazy and should have been in asylums rather than running for political office, but no one was willing to believe that someone with such a public profile could actually mean what he was saying. The politicians in other countries all scoff at warnings about Hitler. They discount it as "just campaign rhetoric" and "once he's in office, he'll tone it down." We all know how well that worked out.

Although Sinclair was a prolific writer, this was the first of his novels that I'd read. When I think of Upton Sinclair I usually remember what might be his most famous (as well as one of his earliest) work, The Jungle, which was based on his own experiences as a muckraking journalist working incognito in meatpacking plants in Chicago. I've never read The Jungle -- it's one of those books that is a little too famous. I have no burning desire to read graphic descriptions of the disgusting stuff that occurs in abattoirs, especially in the days before regulation and USDA inspections. Having read Dragon's Teeth, however, I may go looking for some of Sinclair's other books. Dragon's Teeth was definitely readable.

Next up on the list is another author and book I'd never heard of until I started this project: Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin. It's another obscure winner; there is no summary on Wikipedia, although there are reviews on Amazon.

Pulitzer Project: In This Our Life

Every so often I'll read a book and find myself mentally casting the movie, but it usually doesn't happen immediately. The 1942 Pulitzer winning novel, Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life, was an exception. As soon as the author introduced two of the characters, it hit me: this book was a Bette Davis movie. The physical description of the younger daughter, Stanley Timberlake, just screamed Bette Davis. So did the personality of the character. Of course, it helped that the book is a classic soap opera: a family that at one time had been wealthy but is now just barely getting by; a head of household who's been married for many years to a hypochondriac that he doesn't especially like, let alone love; two sisters with radically different personalities who end up in love with the same man. Soap opera at its best.

In This Our Life  is set in the 1930s in a Virginia city not far from Washington, DC. The Timberlake family had actually come out of the Civil War in pretty good shape but by the 1930s had hit the economic skids. Asa Timberlake's grandfather had owned a tobacco factory that was doing quite well but then was somehow squeezed out by a larger firm; Asa saw the family go from being one of the wealthiest in town to his mother having to take in boarders. Unable to afford college, as a teenager Asa went to work at what had been his family's factory and was still there almost 50 years later. Despite his own penury, he had managed to marry a woman with a rich uncle. It was thanks to the uncle that the family had a decent house, among other things. At the time the novel opens, Asa's  three children are adults: his son Andrew is married with children of his own; the two girls, Roy and Stanley, live at home, although Roy is also married. Roy and her husband, Peter, are living with the Timberlakes to save money until Peter's medical practice is more solidly established.

There had apparently always been a strong sibling rivalry between the two girls. Roy is described as being a quiet brunette; Stanley is an extroverted, perky blonde. Stanley is also the spoiled one. The rich uncle dotes on her while basically ignoring her older, quieter sister, Roy. Uncle William showers Stanley with lavish gifts and even treats her to a Grand Tour of Europe after she finishes school. (Uncle William has a thing for blondes; it's mentioned in passing several times that he kept a blonde mistress in New York.) Despite being everyone's pet, Stanley is never satisfied. Anything Roy has, Stanley wants. When they were children, Stanley would snatch Roy's toys away. Now that they're adults, you guessed it -- she wants the husband. Stanley had been in Europe when Roy married Peter, but once she's back under the same roof as her sister, it doesn't take long for old patterns to resurface. The soap opera begins. Before it ends, we're treated to a jilting, an adulterous relationship, a suicide, a terminal cancer case, a fatal hit-and-run, a wrongfully accused black chauffeur (played by Ernest Anderson in the movie), and a second jilting. It must have been a blast for the actors involved in the film -- lots and lots of opportunity for scenery chewing (and Bette Davis was one of the great scenery chewers; Olivia DeHaviland, Billie Burke, and Hattie McDaniel were no slouches either).

In This Our Life definitely does not qualify as Great Literature. It's soap opera, a fine tradition in American letters but not exactly material that spawns academic dissertations or conferences devoted to the life of the author. It's competently written, albeit a bit odd in places (female characters named Roy and Stanley?), and qualifies easily as "light reading." It's the equivalent of a beach book, although its discussion of race relations and the unfairness of the justice system does introduce a serious note about society as a whole. I've no idea why the Pulitzer judges decided this was the best novel they'd seen that year. Maybe its normalcy appealed to them. The previous winner, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, has to set some sort of record for being one of the most depressing books of all time. Maybe, given the social climate (in 1942 the U.S. was embroiled in a World War) a best seller that was basically fluff held a lot of appeal. The Timberlakes have their problems, no one is really happy, but in general they're surviving.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Probably not. It's not bad, but it does feel dated. It's better than some of the other Pulitzer winners -- I was, after all, able to finish it -- but not by much.

Next up on the list, Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair.

Pultizer Project: The Grapes of Wrath

Okay, it's confession time. I found another Pultizer winner that I flat out could not finish. Maybe my mistake was checking out a collected works book instead of the novel by itself, because by the time I got through the short stories I was already feeling less than enthusiastic about Steinbeck's work. People trapped in loveless marriages, murders, infidelities, beautiful women who turn out to be really, really creepy. . . There is a lot of misogynism in Steinbeck's work, and sometimes it's really thinly veiled. And then I got to the Dust Bowl and the Joads.

The Grapes of Wrath has a plot line that most people are familiar with: the Joads are a poor tenant farm family from Oklahoma that get pushed off the land when drought hits in the 1930s. Like many of their contemporaries, they decide to head for California in search of jobs. Much suffering ensues. Elderly grandparents drop dead along the way (shades of Imogene Coca vacationing with Chevy Chase), husbands abandon wives and kids, babies are stillborn, and conditions in general are horrific.

Of course, the reader is warned up front this is going to be a grim, grim book: the first chapter is devoted to detailed descriptions of the corn dying from lack of rain, and even the weeds giving up and shriveling into dust. Then we're introduced to young Tom Joad, an obnoxious ex-con and a drunk. Turns out Tom's just been turned loose early from the state penitentiary where he'd been serving time for a homicide. It's pretty obvious the Joads' lives were a tragedy long before the Dust Bowl hit; the migration to California and the hell they experience there is just the latest in a long series of bad things they've suffered through.

I think I could have coped with the initially repellant characters like young Tom Joad and the grimness if Steinbeck hadn't decided to indulge in writing dialect. Why, oh, why do some authors seem to think it adds authenticity to have their poor or their ethnic characters speak in dialect?! Maybe the author thought it would make it seem more like a novel and less like propaganda if he added a layer of color to the narrative. I don't recall Steinbeck indulging in dialect in other books, like East of Eden, so maybe he outgrew it. Some authors can pull it off, but in this particular book all the folkiness and dropped consonants did was add another layer of distraction. I was having a hard time focusing on the book to begin with, the dialect made it worse, and eventually I gave up. Given the general downward trend of the Joads (see above for dying grandparents, broken marriages, etc.), I figured the book was going to end with the Joads trying to do the 1930s version of surviving in a refrigerator box under an overpass -- and I didn't need to read any farther to figure out that migrant workers get treated like shit, California was not the promised land, capitalism sucks, and unions (in the field or in the factory) are a good thing.  

Next up, yet another book I'd never heard of before by an equally unknown (at least to me) author, In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow.

Pulitzer Project: The Late George Apley

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. -- Henry David Thoreau

The Late George Apley, which won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for best novel, takes satirical aim at upper-crust Boston by profiling a character who embodies Back Bay Brahmins at their most convention-bound and stuffiest. The novel is written in the form of a memoir, a remembrance of the late George Apley being assembled by a long-time friend of the deceased who also happens to be a writer. The writer's task is to put together a history of George's life using materials provided by his son: letters to and from George, beginning with brief notes he wrote to his parents as a child in the 1870s and continuing right up until just before his death in 1933. The writer's purported goal is to paint a portrait of George Apley that will show him as the wonderful person he was: kind, thoughtful, a good friend, a loving husband and father, a pillar of the community. What emerges instead is a man trapped by convention, stifled in a loveless marriage, scorned by his father as a mediocrity, and ignored and laughed at by his children. 

As the scion of a wealthy Boston family, one whose fortune was made through shipping back before the slave trade became illegal and then diversified into textile mills, poor George follows a highly predictable path: a private grammar school and then Harvard, because there have always been Apleys at Harvard. His father suggests various clubs and charities that George should become involved with, and George allows himself to be steered that way. The few times George comes close to deviating from his expected path, like when he begins seeing an Irish girl from a working class family, his parents intervene. They do the classic rich person's escape route: ship the poor sap off to Europe for a few months and hope he forgets her.

George does what he's told, returns home, marries a girl from his own social set, and goes from having his parents run his life to having his wife call the shots. He does everything he's supposed to do, including starting a collection of antique Chinese bronzes -- not because he likes them (he admits some are remarkably ugly), but because he's got to collect something that can be donated to a museum in the Apley name when George finally shuffles off this mortal coil. The bronzes don't qualify as a fun hobby analogous to a poorer person's baseball cards or souvenir spoons; they're a burden, an obligation that comes with having money.

In fact, everything poor George does he seems to do not because he wants to, but because he's expected to. He really is the embodiment of "quiet desperation." The few times he does seem about to find an escape, his wife steps in to make sure he remains stifled. (He buys an island in Maine to use as a hunting camp that will be "just the fellows," but in short order his wife and his sister push their way in and turn it into something that sounded suspiciously close to Baptist Bible camp, right down to reveille and prayers at 6 a.m. and no booze or tobacco allowed). 

Fortunately for the reader, however, Marquand has a deft touch with words so while poor George is suffering, the reader is snickering at images such as George panicking when he learns his adult daughter and a male companion stopped at a roadhouse, a speakeasy frequented by -- horrors! -- stenographers. He's convinced she'll be ruined for life, that no man will ever want to marry her -- and that is the important thing, that she marry someone from her own social set and carry on in Brahmin society the way Apleys have for generations. (The daughter has different ideas.) He worries about his son spending too much time in New York, because everyone knows New York is one step away from Sodom and Gomorrah and life there could ruin the young Apley for Boston society.

The Late George Apley is a book that some readers might have trouble with. It's almost too easy to read. It's subtle, so an unsophisticated reader could take it at face value and miss the satirical elements. It reminded me of P.G. Wodehouse's jabs at the British upper classes, but where Wodehouse might have pratfalls and broad comedy, Marquand is smoother so the jokes are not as obvious.

The format of this book struck me as an interesting choice, one that gave the writer a lot of freedom to ignore the usual narrative structure of a novel. It was similar to an epistlatory work, but not as formal as most -- and it is much, much better than the one other Pulitzer winner I've read (Gilead) that used a similar technique.

I'm not sure where I'd rank this book in the list of ones I've read so far. It was definitely better than average, but not the best. If I used a 5-star rating system, it would probably get 4 stars.

Next up on the list is The Yearling for 1939. I've already read it, so I'm skipping over it to 1940 and (sometime this summer) The Grapes of Wrath.

Pulitzer Project: Honey in the Horn

Another odd book, and, believe it or not, the pulp edition cover art does actually match up with  the action in one of the chapters. Sort of.

Honey in the Horn won the Pulitzer for a novel in 1936. It's not a bad book, although it reads like an odd hybrid of Zane Grey and Mark Twain. The novel is set in the Pacific Northwest around the beginning of the 20th century. The first few chapters with their descriptions of frontier life -- rough wagon roads, everyone getting around by horseback or on foot, the movement of would-be settlers and migrant farm workers (e.g., hops pickers) by wagon -- had me thinking 1880s, maybe 1890s, but then about midway through there's mention of E. H. Harriman's automobile, which would make it the early 1900s. Harriman died in 1909.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a teenager, Clay, who is the not particularly bright foster son of a local rancher/farmer who operates a stage station. Clay kind of blunders his way through lfe -- has good luck when he's not trying at all, but then gets to see things turn weird on a regular basis for no apparent reason, usually when he's trying to do what he thinks is the right thing. He falls into a relationship with a horse-trader's daughter (she's the one in the bloomers on the cover), and spends 300 pages believing he needs to protect her. (He's wrong, of course.) Along the way, he encounters various restless Americans, all of them thinking the next big chance is going to happen wherever they move to next. He goes from his home ranch into hops-growing country, picks hops for awhile, and then ends up heading west to the Oregon coast near Coos Bay. After spending the winter there, he joins a group of disgruntled settlers who had decided the coast wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and were aiming to settle on the dry side of the mountains (eastern Oregon).

He then wanders east, doing various odd jobs along the way, and eventually ends up in northern Nevada. He and the girlfriend part company for a few chapters, so he spends his spare time obsessing about her. Eventually they're re-united, they vow never to part or keep secrets from each other again -- and right about the time he's realizing he's hooked up with Caril Ann Fugate, the book ends.

I'm not sure just what the point of Honey in the Horn was, or if there even is one. There is a distinct "there's no place like home" undertone to it, as Clay finds himself thinking on a regular basis that the one place he really wanted to be (the stage station) is now the one place he can never go back to. There's also a fair amount of mockery of Americans with their restlessness and get rich quick schemes -- Clay passes through a number of "towns" where someone has platted 40 acres of desolate sagebrush into a town-site, complete with a name like Appledale and lots labeled "opera house" or "mercantile," all in the hopes of suckering people into buying land there on the prospects of the railroad going through.

The novel is well-written. The language is colorful, the descriptions of everyday life in frontier communities is realistic, there's a fair amount of humor and good-natured mockery of human foibles, and there's no moralizing. Stuff happens, people have regrets, but life goes on. This wasn't the best of the winners I've read so far, but it definitely falls into the top half of the pack -- it was worth the $3 interlibrary loan fee.

Next up on the list for 1937 is Gone with the Wind. It's been quite a few years since I read it, but I think I'll skip over it anyway to 1938 and The Late George Apley. I loved Gone with the Wind when I read it in high school; I'd hate to read it now and be appalled by it turning out to be absolute dreck.

Pulitzer Project: Now in November

Ever read a book and have a "well, just how am I supposed to describe this one" reaction? That's what Now in November, the 1935 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, did to me. The writing is lovely, lyrical, but the plot line is one long exercise in proving that just when you think things can't get any worse, they do.

The story focuses on a family that has moved back to the family farm for unspecified reasons, although there's a general impression that whatever business the head of the household had been in previously had failed. The farm had been in the Haldmarne family since the Civil War, but it had been many years since any Haldmarnes had lived there. The property had been rented  to tenant farmers, and then just allowed to be fallow until the current generation of Haldmarnes found themselves forced to use it as a safety net -- and it's a safety net with holes. It turns out the land is mortgaged, so the family has to worry about selling enough produce or livestock to keep the bank at bay.

The narration is from the point of view of one of the family's three daughters; she makes it clear while describing their move to the farm that, although her father had done farmwork, the work is still more than one man can do by himself, but he doesn't want his daughters helping, so, on top of his other worries, he has to figure out how to pay for a hired hand. He manages to find hands locally who are willing to work for room, board, and shares (a portion of the proceeds of whatever crop they manage to sell), although that arrangement is rife with uncertainty, too.

"Much of everything, it seemed afterward, was like that beginning,--changing and so balanced between wind and sun that there was neither good nor evil that could be said to outweigh the other wholly. And even then we felt we had come to something both treacherous and kind, which be could be trusted only to be inconstant, and would go its own way as though we were never born."

Still, the family apparently muddles along for about ten years. The craziest sister graduates from high school and then gets a job as a school teacher at the local one room grade school; the other two sisters remain on the farm helping their parents as best they can. Money's tight, but they're managing until drought hits. It's the third dry year in a row, and the worst yet. Crops wither in the fields, the price of milk being paid by the local dairy drops, things get worse and worse.

Things end badly, of course. Their homecanned produce spoils because the rings were cheap and didn't hold a seal. One of the neighbors falls, breaks a hip, and becomes bedridden and senile overnight. Another, a tenant farmer, ends up evicted because he's unable to pay the rent. Two of the sisters fall in love with the hired hand who, naturally enough, is in the love with the third one, who views him only as a friend. The crazy sister, the one who had been bringing in some money by working as a schoolteacher, loses her tenuous grasp on reality and slashes her wrists. (And even as they fishing her out of the watering trough in the sheep pen, the narrator is wondering how they're going to manage without her income.) Their mother is horribly burned when a grassfire threatens the farm buildings. And so it goes -- one calamity after another. Beautifully written, and incredibly depressing.

Next up, Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis -- another book and author I'd never heard of prior to starting this project.

Pulitzer Project: Lamb in His Bosom

This was kind of an odd book.  Lamb in His Bosom is a Southern novel.  It's set in Georgia, in the area around Jesup and Baxley on the Altamaha River, in the antebellum period following the forced removal of the Cherokee, Creeks, and other Native American groups from the southeastern United States. The book features an afterword by historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, which notes the book's unique perspective, that of the yeoman white farmers whose holdings were too small or too poor to support the use of slave labor. 

The book revolves around the life of Cean Carver, from her marriage to Lonzo Smith until the birth of her 14th child almost 30 years later.  (Cean is pronounced See-Ann.) When the book begins, Cean is apparently about 16 years old.  By the time she's in her mid-30s, she's described as having hair that is almost totally white.  (Life on the frontier was hard; Cean's mother is a hopeless invalid and totally senile by age 60.)  Of course, popping out a baby every other year, including two sets of twins, and then seeing 5 kids die (including one that's burned alive) would age anyone. Cean's family lives on what is considered the extreme frontier inland in Georgia, an area just being settled by white families.  Farms are pretty widely scattered, and the nearest town of any size is Darien, a city on the coast that takes about a week to reach by ox cart.  Once a year the men trek to Darien to trade surplus produce (lard, honey, cotton, wool) in exchange for the things they can't make themselves.  Cean's parents had moved to the wiregrass country from North Carolina around the time of the War of 1812, drawn by the promise of cheap land and a climate that made it possible to grow crops all year round.

I approached Lamb in His Bosom with a fair amount of trepidation.  I'd just had the horrible experience of reading The Store, another Southern novel, and wasn't too keen on reading more dialect.  I was also a little worried because the DeKalb County Library system owned a zillion copies of the book -- every branch seems to have two or three listed, and they were apparently all circulating.  Discovering that a book is popular isn't always a good sign -- Danielle Steel books circulate like crazy, too.  Fortunately, Lamb in His Bosom turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

The dialect, which struck me as as more than a bit twee, wasn't as distracting as dialect sometimes can be.  The book was surprisingly readable.  How authentic the dialect used was is debatable.  Fox-Genovese praises Caroline Miller for her meticulous research and seems to believe that Miller did a decent job of capturing actual speech patterns.  I'm always skeptical when people make sweeping claims for things that can't be proven.  Still, Miller was from southern Georgia and lived in Baxley.  She's described as having spent many hours going out into the countryside and talking with old folks as she worked on the book, and the book was (and is) praised for its historical realism. Miller presents a rare glimpse into the life of yeoman farmers in the time period before the Civil War, the subsistence farmers who had to rely on family members for labor, working the land with oxen because they couldn't afford to buy horses or mules. 

Lamb in His Bosom is rich with details about folkways and superstitions, like applying cobwebs to a wound to help stop the bleeding.  Cobwebs in the rafters were considered good luck, probably for that perceived first aid value.  Miller describes Cean and her mother spinning, weaving, cooking, giving birth and raising children.  The men in the book aren't as fully fleshed out, undoubtedly because it was easier for Miller to talk with women about the old days then with men.  Similarly, one of the weakest sections of the book is when one of the characters leaves Georgia after hearing about gold in California.  His fate is recounted in a few thin paragraphs while back on the farm Cean's recollections of processing sugar cane and how the young folk would flirt with each other become almost lyrical.  Miller would have known personally how cane was crushed on the farm and the cane sap boiled; California was a place she knew only from books.

Not surprisingly, given both the time period when the book was written and the era when it is set, some of the word choices and sentiments expressed in the novel can be a little jarring to the 21st century reader.  Fortunately, those passages tend to be brief. 

Fox-Genovese makes one claim for Lamb in His Bosom that had me slightly baffled.  She asserts that the success of the book led the publisher to go looking for other Southern writers, leading inevitably to Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind.  She makes it sound as though Miller's novel was some breathtaking breakthrough, like no novels set in the South had achieved national acclaim before.  Given that The Store, written by a native of Alabama and set in that state during Reconstruction, won the Pulitzer in 1933 and Scarlet Sister Mary, set among the Gullah of South Carolina, won in 1929, it's an odd claim to make. 

Next up, yet another book by an author I've never heard of:  Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson.  I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that in this one everyone speaks standard English.

Pulitzer Project: The Store

This turned out to be another one that I flat out could not finish.  Call me shallow as a reader, but I have a hard time sustaining interest in novels when the primary feeling the main characters inspire is disgust.  I really find it hard to believe this book beat out Mutiny on the Bounty for the Pulitzer prize for best novel in 1933.

Thomas S. Stribling's The Store is the middle part of a trilogy set in northern Alabama, the city of Florence and the rural area around it.  The trilogy follows the fortunes of the Vaiden family, with the first book set during the decade of the Civil War, the second about 20 years later right around the time Grover Cleveland was running for president, and the third is apparently set in the early twentieth century.  Stribling was from Alabama and knew the Florence area well.  His characterizations do feel real.

Stribling is also a decent writer.  Other than his extensive use of dialect, especially when his black characters are speaking, the book flows well.  It would be easy reading if it wasn't so incredibly depressing. 

And why is it depressing?  Well, for a start, a big chunk of the novel is taken up with the white characters pissing and moaning about the fact that the (and I will use the term repeated over and over and over in the novel) niggers no longer know their place.  It's been almost 20 years since the Confederates lost the damn war but they're still not willing to concede times have changed -- they all want to go back to the glory days of slavery. 

Although, come to think of it, that doesn't sound a whole lot different than some of the stuff we've been hearing at Tea Party rallies, does it?  Some things apparently never change.

Then when you realize that as you're getting to know the characters that every single one of them is either doomed (usually through his or her own stupidity and/or greed) or remarkably sleazy, turning the pages becomes harder and harder.  Col. Vaiden figures out his old nemesis, the general store owner, Handback, has a secret that would get him drummed out of the Methodist church if it came out -- Handback is keeping a black mistress, Gracie, a quadroon.  Gracie in turn has a son who is 7/8s white and could "pass" if he lived almost anywhere else in the country; unfortunately, in Florence he's known as "that white nigger," because everyone knows who his mother is, and he suffers even more abuse than blacks who are visibly black because he has the gall to look white.  Gracie fantasizes about leaving Florence, going north and telling people she's Mexican, because she knows both she and Touissant (her son) would be better off someplace else.  She never does, at least not when it would have made a difference, and that's typical of many of the characters -- the likable ones can see a way out, but don't take it; the despicable ones continue being despicable.  (Vaiden also has a history with Gracie, but it's one he never thinks about -- back before the war, he was jilted by his fiancee.  His response to being jilted was to go out to the stables and rape Gracie, who at that time belonged to his family.) 

Col. Vaiden uses the knowledge of the black mistress to blackmail Handback into giving him a clerk's position at the store.  Socially, it's a come-down for Vaiden (he's a war hero, famous locally for his actions at Shiloh, and his family used to have money), but he does need the salary.  It doesn't take him long to figure out that a good deal of Handback's financial success is due to his shady business methods and willingness to screw over the customers who can't complain:  he always short-weights purchases by black customers, for example, giving them 12 ounces of bacon while making them pay for a full pound.  He owns a number of tenant farms, and he cheats his sharecropping tenants, too:  on top of taking the normal share, he charges extra, more than the going rate, for ginning the cotton and having it shipped. 

Thus, when Col. Vaiden sees an opportunity to rip off Handback, he doesn't hesitate. He ships 500 bales of cotton to New Orleans.  Through sheer coincidence, the river floods right after the cotton is shipped.  Handback thinks it's been washed away by the floodwaters, and despairs -- it's an enormous financial blow to lose the cotton, one from which he might not be able to recover.  Col. Vaiden immediately realizes that if Handback thinks the cotton is lost, it's a chance for Vaiden to pocket the entire proceeds of the sale. 

And that's the point at which I gave up.  Handback was off somewhere having hysterics (and for all I know blowing his brains out), and Col. Vaiden was gloating over the $48,000 bank draft he had just received.  He was beginning to feel twinges of paranoia because he's realized the black crew of the tug that took the barge of cotton down to New Orleans might talk, and Handback will figure out the truth.  He's also realizing he can't go waltzing into his local bank with the check, because for sure the tellers will say something.  He's got to cash the draft fast before Handback can notify the authorities in New Orleans to put a hold on it, but he's agonizing over where and how.

It struck me then that I really didn't care.  I didn't care if Col. Vaiden got away with his scheme, I didn't care if his overweight wife lived or died (based on reviews I read before I started the book, she apparently dies; one of the subplots involves her apparent late life pregnancy, so maybe she shuffled off this mortal coil in childbirth) (one of the more repellent aspects of the book is Stribling's descriptions of poor fat Ponny), I didn't care if Handback kept right on banging Gracie and then going off to church to complain about the niggers and bitch about the Republicans like every other white man in Florence, I didn't care if the white postmaster died of loneliness because he was the only white Republican in town and thus a social pariah. 

The good news about this book?  I checked it out from the library, so the only thing it cost me was my time.

Pulitzer Project: Years of Grace

I had the oddest feeling as I started reading Years of Grace, the novel that won the Pulitzer for a novel in 1931, that I'd accidentally picked up a book by Louisa May Alcott.  The first chapter or two were highly reminiscent of Alcott's Under the Lilacs with a few hints of Little Women tossed in for good measure. The feeling passed, but it's obvious (and probably not surprising) the author was influenced by Alcott's work.  Until recently, it was a rare American girl who was not familiar with the March sisters (the Moss siblings are a little less well-known).

Years of Grace was the first novel written by author Margaret Ayer Barnes, and is one that appears to some extent to be highly autobiographical.  Like Barnes, the heroine, Jane, was born in Chicago in the 1880s and attended an eastern ivy league women's college.  Where their lives diverge is that Barnes completed her college education and had a professional career, whereas Jane leaves college after her sophomore year and ends up married to a banker from Boston and living in the Chicago suburbs.    

The novel follows Jane's life from her early teens, the point at which her older sister is about to make her debut into society, through middle age and into grandmotherhood.  Jane is a good girl, so, with the notable exception of pushing hard to be allowed to go east to college rather than being sent off to a finishing school like several of her friends, she generally does what she's told as well as conforming with conventional societal norms.  She might be tempted to run off with a childhood sweetheart or to have a mid-life fling with a friend's husband, but she's not likely to follow through on either impulse.  She spends every summer quietly resenting being stuck at the beach house with her aging proper Bostonian in-laws, but it never occurs to her to complain at all to her husband about being bored and/or miserable. 

I had a mixed reaction to this book.  It is gracefully written, and I loved the descriptions of Chicago changing over time.  The street where Jane grew up goes from being quietly residential with large, gracious houses on big lots to a busy commercial thoroughfare, for example, just as she goes from riding in horse-drawn carriages to driving her own car.  The contrast between Jane's conventional life in the early years of the 20th century and those of her college friends who stay in school is intriguing:  one friend becomes a successful playwright and another goes on to earn a doctorate and eventually serve as a college president.  There's a lot of discussion of changing social mores:  Jane's daughter gets a divorce, and makes it clear to her mother that the times have changed, the idea of a divorce turning a person into a Scarlet Woman is passe, and there's no longer any reason to stay in a boring or loveless marriage.  Years of Grace actually makes a fairly strong case for women being strong and independent rather than assuming marriage and a mythical happy ever after should be their goal.

On the other hand, I do prefer the central characters of the books I read to actually serve as the center of the action, not merely as a powerless observer of what's going on around him or her.  And Jane is very much an observer.  Things happen to her and around her, but she doesn't initiate much (if anything) herself.  She goes with the flow, and, even if it is an interesting flow, it's still a little too passive for my taste. 

Overall, this was one of the better books I've read so far from the Pulitzer winners list.  It does feel a little dated, but it is well-written and readable, which is more than I could say about one or two others that are better remembered and still referred to as classics.  I'm guessing that one reason it won in 1931 is that it reflected the public mood of the time wanting stability and a sense of survivorship:  troubling things happen to Jane and her family -- kids rebel, marriages fall apart, people die -- but in the end it all works out.  Barnes finished the novel before the full impact of the October 1929 stock market crash and the economic depression that followed would have been apparent, so it was probably coincidence that she managed to hit just the right combination of nostalgia and hopefulness to guarantee her first major work of fiction became a best seller.

One minor oddity about this book within the context of the Pulitzer Prize list is its almost complete lack of exotic others.  The prize winning novels in 1929 and 1930 were about locations and persons essentially foreign to the average U.S. reader (the Gullah residents of a South Carolina plantation and Navajos in Arizona, respectively), and in 1932 the prize would go to The Good Earth, which is about Chinese peasants.  In 1931, however, middle class white Americans leading comparatively stable, ordinary lives untouched by melodrama were apparently the protagonists that resonated best with the prize committee and reading public. 

Would I recommend Years of Grace to other readers?  Yes.  If I had to compare Barnes to a modern author, I'd say that if a reader likes works by authors such as Jodi Picoult, he or she would find Barnes to be a decent read.  Compared to Picoult, Barnes is a more innocent writer (she hints at things Picoult would have no qualms about describing directly), but she's equally readable.

Barnes, incidentally, is one of those writers who has fallen so far off the radar that a Google images search yielded only one very small (thumbnail size) photo of a cover for Years of Grace and one poor quality photo of the author herself -- and that was on the Find a Grave website.  She published several other novels as well as short stories in the 1930s, and then apparently stopped writing fiction.  She died in 1967, her remains were cremated, and her ashes were scattered on Mount Desert Island in Maine.

Pulitzer Project: Laughing Boy

I'm not quite sure what to say about Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy.  Maybe Tony Hillerman ruined me for reading fiction set in Navajo country. Or maybe I'm just not too thrilled with books that have as their hero The Noble Savage. 

There was nothing overtly offensive about Laughing Boy.  If anything, the book is sympathetic toward the plight of the Navajo in the early 20th century.  It condemns, for example, the Indian schools that punished children for speaking their native language and that left the children existing in a cultural limbo:  cut off from their heritage but not accepted by the white world either.

Maybe the problem was the book just felt dated.  Even worse, I felt like I was reading a Zane Grey novel.  I read a lot of Zane Grey in high school and to say the books were formulaic is an understatement, cheap westerns where it's pretty much a case of if you've read one, you've read them all. Of course, if a person has never read a Zane Grey western, then maybe Laughing Boy will seem delightfully different instead of stale and cliche-ridden.

The basic plot line is the usual:  boy (Laughing Boy) meets girl (Slim Girl); they're instantly smitten.  She, however, has a Dark Secret, something in life that has given her a Bad Reputation.  When Laughing Boy goes to his oldest uncle to say he wants to marry Slim Girl (after knowing her for a day and talking with her one time), his uncle tells him The Family Does Not Approve.  No kidding.  At this point Laughing Boy hasn't even taken the time to ask her about her lineage -- which is one of the things about the book that felt wrong.  Laughing Boy is supposed to be so traditional he doesn't speak English, he's a total blanket Indian, someone who never attended a mission or Bureau of Indian Affairs school and who is totally immersed in the Navajo belief system.  So by not asking about her lineage, i.e., finding out her mother's clan, he's risking committing incest.

In any case, he ignores his uncle's advice.  The young couple elope, they live reasonably happily for awhile, and then Slim Girl's past catches up with them.    

In the forward to the book, the author mentions spending a fair amount of time in the early 1920s on the Navajo reservation (or close to it).  I got the impression, based on the content of the book, he was there long enough to learn about basic creation beliefs and Navajo religious ritual (sand paintings, etc) as well as some bits and pieces of the language so was able to weave those elements into the novel, but not long enough to really understand the clan system.  Does it make a difference in terms of the quality of the novel?  Probably not.  It set me up to be dubious about the entire book -- it's hard to get into a story when the author has started off with something that feels so wrong -- but other readers may not have the same reaction.

The book was made into a movie starring Roman Navarro in 1934.  If I were to cast it today, I'd put Adam Beach in the lead.  The character of Laughing Boy has that sort of clean-cut, upbeat persona that Beach seems to end up projecting regardless of the role he's supposed to be playing.  Slim Girl would be trickier -- although the title of the book is Laughing Boy, Slim Girl is the character it really revolves around.  Her life, her past, and her secrets make her a much more complicated character.  With Laughing Boy what you see is what you get; you know exactly how he's going to respond and why he does what he does.  And in the end, of course, in the fine literary tradition of the Fallen Woman Must Pay for Her Sins, Slim Girl's secrets cost her and Laughing Boy everything.

Laughing Boy earned Oliver La Farge the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for best novel.

Pulitzer Project: Scarlet Sister Mary

Scarlet Sister Mary earned author Julia Peterkin a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1929.  It is, by today's standards, a curious book. 

Of course, it was no doubt viewed as a curious book when it was published.  It is set in a small black rural community in South Carolina in the early 1900s.  The setting is, in fact, a cotton plantation where the people live in cabins that are obviously the former slave quarters. 

As Peterkin tells us, the Big House has been abandoned since the Civil War, but the descendants of the slaves are still on the plantation, still farming (either as hired hands or share cropping, the book never makes that clear) and managing to make a decent (by their standards) living for themselves.  Every major character in the book is black, and much of the dialogue is written in dialect meant to convey the actual speaking patterns of the people.  One synopsis I read described them as speaking Gullah; I wouldn't know, but will note that, although some of the dialect struck me as odd, it wasn't distracting.  Peterkin writes with sufficient skill that the speech patterns seem more poetic than patronizing.  I've read a number of books where authors attempt to have characters speak in the vernacular, and it comes as across as stilted or condescending.  Not here.  Peterkin definitely had a poet's ear for language.

Peterkin was born in the South Carolina low country, and spent her adult married life there.  She was intimately familiar with the region and the people she describes in Scarlet Sister Mary.  She also obviously had tremendous respect for her characters.  At a time when African Americans were generally portrayed in fiction in terms of racial stereotypes (Mammys, Sambos, and so on), Peterkin did something radical:  she described a group of people who were simply that, people, men and women going about their daily lives as best they could and experiencing the same problems as everyone else:  love, romance, worrying about their children, and hurrying to get the house looking nice when they realized company was coming.  They're not some exotic Other; they're just ordinary folks trying to live their lives the way they always have while coping as best they can with the resources they have.

The title comes from the heroine of the book, Mary.  She's Sister Mary because she was baptized into the church and therefore is a sister, and she's scarlet because she messed up.  Her initial sin was dancing on her wedding night, but she added others as the years went by.  Her scarlet status gave the church deacons an excuse to expel her from church membership, although it's clear that being kicked out of the church for sinning and being able to keep right on attending the meetings are two different things -- it's not unusual for someone to be expelled, rejoin, and get expelled again on a regular basis.  The big difference with Mary is that having been expelled as a teenager, she doesn't try to rejoin again for many years.

And that's where I had my biggest problems with this book -- the religious element.  Mary had a conversion experience when she was about 12 years old, was baptized, but then is expelled for the sin of dancing.  She has no use for God again until many years later when she's hit hard by a personal tragedy.  Then, emotionally devastated, she has another conversion experience.  No doubt to a believer, it would come across as a wonderful, uplifiting ending.  To an atheist, not so much. 

Overall, though, this was a fun book to read.  Peterkin had an anthropologist's eye for capturing folkways.  Her descriptions of the church services, with the formal service followed by the women's shout, a tradition that had obvious roots in African tribal culture and rituals; the birth-night celebrations (again with women chanting and stomping in a circle); funeral customs that dictated that a coffin could not be placed into a grave until sunlight had touched the bottom of the grave and that the burial itself took place right after sundown; and various folk cures and superstitions all help ground her characters.  As the story progresses, you can see change to the old folkways creeping in:  a burial society is formed where before no one thought one was necessary, more of the children start going to school and learning to read and write, more machinery is being introduced resulting both in a higher risk of injury and fewer workers being needed, the boll weevil makes it so hard to survive farming cotton that more and more of the young people leave to find work in the cities.  But that's primarily background -- the focus is always more on Mary's emotional life, what's happening with her, her relationships with the people around her, and, ultimately, her relationship with God.

One thing that really struck me while reading Scarlet Sister Mary was how much it resembled Zora Neale Hurston's book Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published in 1937 and is, at least as far as I'm concerned, one of the most overrated and unreadable books I've ever had the misfortune to pick up. (It's also one of the rare books that I simply flatout could not finish.) I've never been able to figure out why it's garnered so much praise over the years (the novelist Alice Walker, for example, loves it and has written numerous essays proclaiming it's one of the best books of all time), and I'm even more convinced now that Hurston has been over-hyped. 

Although I wasn't too thrilled with the denouement turning out to be whether or not Mary  found Jesus again, overall I enjoyed reading Scarlet Sister Mary.  Julia Peterkin could write.  I'm really surprised I'd never heard of her before I started this Pulitzer Project; she's a lot more readable than some most of the Southern writers that have received a lot more page space in literature classes and critics' commentaries. 

Next up on the list, another one that's an unknown:  Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge.

Pulitzer Project: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is one of those wonderful, lyrical books that you pick up meaning to just read a few pages at a shot and in a remarkably short time realize you've read the entire thing.  Granted, it is a small book -- the edition I read was perhaps 145 pages in length -- but it's also extremely well-written.  It flows. 

The premise of the book struck me as rather odd before I began reading.  Five people are crossing an old Inca-built bridge in the Spanish colony of Peru, the bridge fails, and they fall to their death.  A monk, Brother Juniper, decides to explore their lives.  He's convinced there must be a reason, that there should be a way to calculate scientifically why God decides some people live while others die.  He wants to work out a mathematical formula that will both explain God's will and prove God's existence.  He refuses to believe it was simply bad luck, chance, random coincidence that put those five people on the bridge when it broke.   

The narrator, the omniscient author's voice, then notes that although the monk invested tremendous amounts of time, accumulated hundreds of pages of notes, and eventually wrote an enormous book describing the victims' lives, he didn't get it right.  There were things about all five that were known only to themselves, and, of course, to the omniscient author telling us their stories. 

Wilder naturally invests more pages of narration for some characters than others.  The eccentric elderly female aristocrat has a lot more back story to explore than the adolescent orphan girl who had been raised in a convent, for example.  In the end, though, they all walk out on to the bridge and die.  What they have in common is something that can't be reduced to a rational calculus -- their humanity, and the love and memories of those who survive them.  We may never truly know what another person is thinking or believing, but we can all love. 

The book does have some structural flaws.  The chronology (continuity?) seems off in places, but that's a minor quibble.  Overall, this is a lovely book:  beautifully written with layers of meaning and with absolutely no wasted words.   

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer in 1928.  Next up?  Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin, a book and an author I'd never heard of until I began reading the prize winners.  I have a sinking, vaguely apprehensive feeling that it's not going to be nearly as good as Wilder's work.

Pulitzer Project: Early Autumn

Okay. I'm up to 1927, and am noticing a pattern: one out of every 4 books has managed to stand the test of time and is still worth reading. Louis Bromfield's Early Autumn is not one of them.

I can, however, understand why it was a best seller back in the 1920s. The underlying theme is rich people (at least the ones with old money) are miserable, they lead lives of quiet desperation/ frustration, they're sexually repressed and suffer for it, their cherished family myths and values are built on fantasy and fraud, and they keep insane relatives in the attic.

Maybe I would have been more impressed if (spoiler alert!) the big reveal hadn't been that the insane relative in the attic wound up that way because her wedding night was so traumatic -- totally unprepared for what her Wifely Duty actually consisted of, her fumbling virginal husband's lovemaking caused the young, innocent bride to suffer a mental breakdown. Bromfield is, of course, making an argument that the repressive, puritanical attitudes of the past lead only to misery, broken lives, and mental hospitals, but it's pretty hard to take the melodrama seriously.

Pulitzer Project: Arrowsmith

My trek up the Pulitzer Prize fiction winners list continues with Arrowsmith, the 1926 winner written by Sinclair Lewis. Lewis must have been a bit of an odd duck, because he refused to accept the prize, although he wasn't as shy about accepting a Nobel for literature a few years later.

But then Arrowsmith is an odd book. In terms of readability, how well it's stood the test of time, and other criteria, it falls in the middle of the pack of the early prize winners (1918-1926) I've read so far. It's not nearly as good as the Willa Cather work, but for sure it's head and shoulders above Ernest Poole's His Family. Still, it felt a bit incoherent, like Lewis wasn't really sure just what it was he was shooting for when he wrote it.

Its main character, Martin Arrowsmith, is, to say the least, exasperating, one of those guys who kind of bumbles along cluelessly, full of insecurities, fearing he'll be viewed as a hick or a rube but at the same totally convinced of his own superiority, and in the end baffled as to why nothing he does turns out quite the way he thought it would. As I was reading it, I kept thinking, this poor sap is an Aspie! As written, Martin is classic Asperger's syndrome: highly intelligent, tightly focused on the one thing that fascinates him, and absolutely lost when it comes to social interactions and having some insight into what other people might be thinking or feeling.

Brief plot synopsis: Martin Arrowsmith is a fellow from a small town in a fictionalized Minnesota. I'm not sure why the author makes up a state rather than coming right out and saying Minnesota when the one he does make up is clearly geographically and politically improbable (bounded by Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan), but he does. Martin's hero as a boy is the town doctor, an aging bachelor alcoholic who in his sober moments extols the glories of science to Martin and inspires him to go to college and medical school.

Martin's parents both conveniently die just before he leaves for college, a state university, so he has a small inheritance to help support him through school, but not much. He lives on a pretty tight budget. He spends his summers working (one year he's on a crew putting in a telegraph line across Montana, another he spends as a waiter at a resort hotel), and the school year engrossed in his classes and engaged in awkward interactions with fellow students. When he enters medical school, he pledges the medical fraternity and moves into the frat house even though he doesn't have much use for any of his fraternity brothers. He has a roommate that annoys him by being noisy, rude, and generally inconsiderate, but instead of moving out or asserting himself at all, he suffers in martyred silence because when it comes to personal relationships he's too insecure to speak up.

And so it goes. We're shown Martin's life from Martin's perspective, and the combination of total naivete and smug superiority tends to be a little off-putting. I had a hard time getting through the first half of the book. It wasn't easy getting interested in a character who was as completely self-centered as Martin Arrowsmith. He's so totally convinced that he's right (after all, science is on his side) that he's incapable of understanding why other people don't Get It. His faith in scientific evidence is absolute while his people skills apparently are close to nonexistent, so it's no surprise he's a failure as a small town GP in North Dakota, despite being the son-in-law of the town banker. He does a little better when he gets a position as an assistant public health officer in a large city in Iowa, but blows that position by once again being so narrowly focused on the science he neglects the people who count.

Eventually, through the sheer dumb luck of having one of his former college professors in a position to help him, he ends up in a research position at a private scientific institute in New York. One assumes the fictional institution is loosely based on the Rockefeller Foundation. Martin is finally in a place where he can devote his energies 100% to basic research, and he does. He makes a remarkable discovery -- he finds phages, viruses that kill bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus -- and is pushed to publish quickly. Naturally, he decides to be stubborn and not submit a paper until he's absolutely sure there are no questions left, demonstrating that he could be as naive about science (there are always more questions) (every published paper concludes with a variation on "additional research is needed") as he is about people. Just as naturally, another scientist makes a similar discovery, getting the credit and, in the process, annoying the institute's directors so Martin's hopes of a promotion (more money, bigger lab, more assistants) vaporize.

The real drama in the book comes toward the end -- Martin has been tasked with investigating plague and attempting to find a cure. Plague was still a major health issue in the early part of the 20th century, despite the cause being well known, and Martin's assignment is to find a cure or a preventative -- or both. In the 1920s antimicrobials like penicillin were unheard of; the focus in infectious disease prevention was on vaccines and type-specific sero therapy (i.e., using antibodies obtained from a survivor of a disease to cure patients ill with that disease; sera were developed by passing the disease through animals [lab rats, monkeys])*. The bacterium responsible for plague, yersinia pestis, has been known since 1894, along with its vectors (fleas carried by rodents). Martin thinks he's close to a break-through, he has a serum that seems to work, and then he's pushed to use it before he's sure it's ready.

Plague hits an island in the Caribbean. The institute sends Martin and a colleague to the island with instructions to do whatever they can to stop the devastation. Martin wants to administer the serum as a controlled experiment, i.e., just give it to half the plague victims so he can compare survival rates; his colleague says their duty is to give it to everyone. In the end the colleague dies, followed not long after by Martin's wife (a woman who Lewis should have described as wearing a halo along with her cotton dresses, because it doesn't matter what Martin does, she supports it), and Martin Arrowsmith goes slightly mad -- and injects everyone he can. Whether or not the serum actually made a difference becomes impossible to tell, because plague tends to run its course naturally. The outbreak could have been at its peak when they arrived, and the serum may not have made any difference at all.

Still, the institute takes the credit for getting the outbreak under control, Martin gets handed a promotion (bigger lab, more underlings) when he gets back to New York, and he bumbles along awhile longer. He even acquires a very wealthy wife, a woman who initially loves him because of his devotion to science but ends up alienated by the amount of time he spends in the lab.
The book ends with Martin more or less happy -- he's in the lab where he's always wanted to be -- but basically alone. I'm not sure just what point Sinclair Lewis was trying to make. Good scientists aren't motivated by money? It's not possible to do science and deal with people, too? Most people are idiots with tunnel vision? Rich people are essentially shallow?

Sinclair Lewis is one of those authors I've been hearing about for years, a major figure on the American literary scene whose books fall into the "of course you're read. . . " category when the reality is that unless they're assigned in a college class almost no one picks up a copy of Babbit, Elmer Gantry, or Arrowsmith. We know the titles; most of us have never read and never will read the actual books. Will I read the others now that I have read Arrowsmith? I don't know. Arrowsmith was readable, more or less, but when I find myself reacting to a book by thinking "I've read worse," that isn't exactly high praise.

Arrowsmith was made into a movie in 1931 starring Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. In typical cinematic fashion, the movie apparently compresses the time line for Martin's life considerably. An on-line synopsis describes it as "one of the most prestigious films of its time," which is generally code for "doesn't stand up well." I'm not sure I have any interest in ever seeing it, at least not going by the cheesy poster photo of Helen Hayes dying in Ronald Colman's arms. It definitely hints at lots of melodramatic over the top ham acting -- and it does fall into that time period when actors were still making the transition from the exaggerations necessary in silent films to being able to be more subtle in talkies.

Next up on the list: 1927 and Louis Bromfeld's Early Autumn, another book I'd never heard of before looking at the Pulitzer winners list. It's going to be another Interlibrary Loan Request because DeKalb does not have it in its catalog.

[*This is a technique that's still used today, especially with novel or rare pathogens. Doctors will transfuse plasma from recovered survivors of a disease to current victims. If it's done early enough, it can work.]