Despite having a BA in English, I am more of a Science Fiction and Mystery reader. The Pulitzer Prize winners are a nice counterpoint to my usual reading. I am just starting out on this journey. Here is what I have read so far. My reactions are on my blog.
Showing posts with label 1918 His Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1918 His Family. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
His Family (1918)
Roger Gale is a widower with three adult daughters and he has suddenly realized he doesn’t know them. That is where the action begins in His Family, the 1918 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. This realization would doubtless concern him no matter what, but he is especially dismayed because he had promised his wife when she died that he would keep an eye on the girls and report back to her when they met again in the afterlife. He has since suffered a crisis of faith and withdrawn from his family. But now he means to get to know them once again.
Each daughter represents a possible path for a woman to follow, and tracing the drawbacks and benefits of each path is a major theme in the book. One daughter, Laura, is a socialite, a party girl with no plans to have children and with no social consciousness. Another, Edith, is a mother of five who is so wrapped up in her own children that she cannot think or speak of anything else. The third, Deborah, is a social reformer and suffragist who is terrified to marry and have children because she fears she will never be able to go on with her work, which is the most important thing to her. Roger Gale is most often perplexed by each daughter, and even more so by the interactions between them. The narrator clearly favors Deborah, the social reformer, from the start and Roger gets there eventually too. She is, obviously, the best of his daughters.
The woman question was on the top of the nation’s mind in 1918, so it’s no surprise that this book was awarded the Pulitzer. But there is more to it than that. A deeper and more enduring theme is mortality and how we find immortality in the lives of our family. Before she died, Roger’s wife told him, “You will live on in our children’s lives.” Throughout the book he realizes the truth of that statement, as he gets to know his daughters and finds himself in each of them. He feels the roots of his family before him and seeks comfort in the fact that he, too, will be a figure in the distance to the coming generations.
Finally, Roger often contemplates the youth of mankind – he feels as a child still, and he sees everyone else in the same way. All his life he has felt that he is just beginning, and now he is already nearing the end. As he walks through a birch grove on his farm one evening, he comes to an understanding of it all. “It seemed to Roger that all his days he had been only entering life, as some rich bewildering thicket like this copse of birches here, never getting very deep, never seeing very clearly, never understanding all. And so it had been with his children, and so it was with these children of Edith’s, and so it would be with those many others – always groping, blundering, starting – children, only children all.”
The book also deals with the growth of New York City; immigration and poverty; and World War I. Roger Gale came to New York when horses and carriages traveled its roads, and now he has to face the crush of modern life with its fast cars, tall buildings and bright lights. Little did Roger know that the chaos of urban life was only just beginning. One facet of this new city life that Roger struggles so much with is the influx of immigrants and the rise of tenements. As he gets to know Deborah he sees her work with the children of these tenements and he gains a new understanding of the deprivation they face. When World War I breaks out, he is faced with suffering on an even grander scale. Roger comes to a new understanding of humankind and he learns to make sacrifices to help those beyond his own family.
These political themes play an important role in the book, but it’s true strength is in dealing with the personal. As Roger Gale comes to know his daughters, we come to know more about life. Can we ask anything more from a novel?
Friday, May 1, 2009
His Family (1918)
I read the first Pulitzer Prize winner, His Family by Ernest Poole, for my first entry into this Pulitzer Project. I see that there have been a couple of very thorough reviews already. The novel is about a widower and his three adult daughters, who each seem to exemplify a "type" of woman of that time. The oldest daughter, Edith, is caught up in her own family. She'll do anything to protect her children and would never consider working outside her family.
Deborah, the middle daughter, probably represents the "new" woman of the time--she works at a school and has thousands of tenement children she is interested in. She is a quintessential do-gooder and probably was a socialist and a suffragist. The youngest daughter represents the pleasure principle. She loves fashion and travel; she marries, has an affair (as does her husband), divorces, and remarries.
The characters never really transcend the stereotypes. I can understand, however, that the Pulitzer Committee perceived this as a novel of ideas and of society.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
1918: His Family
Early 20th century New York City is the setting for His Family. Roger Gale is the head of a well-to-do family of three daughters; all four are very different not only in character but also in the way each embraces or rejects the changes that are occurring so rapidly, particularly as a result of the waves of immigration that crowd the city and change its physical, moral, and social landscape.
Roger, now in his late 50s, is a New Englander who moved to the city as a young man and threw himself into its life. He owns a successful small business. A widower, his life revolves around his three daughters; he views himself as something of their protector and patriarch, even though all three are all of age. He is uncertain about the changes that he sees in New York, a city he loves. He raised his family in a traditional fashion, in a large home he owns. Now, all around him he feels pressed in by the apartment buildings that not only tower over his home but also seem to be populated with hundreds if not thousands of pairs of eyes of stranger, people whom he does not know—not really neighbors in the sense to which he is accustomed.
Edith, his oldest daughter, is married and the mother of 4, expecting a 5th child. She represents in the novel the traditional ways of ‘old’ New York—the pre-immigrant, slower way of life where the wife stayed at home, raised the children, and provided a comfortable, smooth-running home for her husband. Raised in privilege, used to servants, she views the newcomers with disdain, considering them undesirable. At one point in the book, she dismisses the idea of sending them to anything other than private schools for fear that her children will be forced to associate with “them”. She stands for tradition, for what is known and cherished, and all the values, both good and bad, that are associated with a woman’s traditional role in a family.
Deborah, the middle daughter, is of a totally different cut of cloth. A career woman and idealistic reformer, she heads a radically modern (for that day) school, coming into daily and intimate contact with immigrant children and their families. She sees at first hand their struggles and identifies strongly with them. She gives herself tirelessly to her work which is her life. Terrified of marriage and motherhood for fear that she will be then trapped and unable to continue her life’s work, she continually puts off marriage to Allan, a young doctor equally as idealistic as Deborah.
The third daughter, Laura, might as well have arrived from a different galaxy. She is the party girl, the forerunner of the flapper, whose gaiety fills the house and charms each of her family. Suddenly engaged and then married to an up-and-coming wealthy young businessman, Laura is the frivolous one, the grasshopper to Deborah’s and Edith’s hard-working ants.
World War I disrupts this family as it did so many others. Roger’s business falls on hard times, and the family is forced to cope in ways it has never imagined. The changes occurring in the city at large impose themselves on the family in an intimate way. Life changes irrevocably; each of the Gales adapts and grows in accordance with their characters.
This is another novel that really has no plot to speak of, but rather in its own way is a documentary of a white, upper middle-class family caught in overwhelming changes they can neither foresee nor prevent from impacting their lives no matter what their outlook. The story is told from Roger’s point of view, as he observes and reflects on the actions of his family and tries to reconcile it all. It is his book.
Of all the early Pulitzer Prize winners, I found Poole’s writing style the most dated. That doesn’t mean that the book was difficult, but it was slow-going in a way that, for example, The Magnificent Ambersons, published two years later, was not. Still, I found the story interesting, if not absorbing, from a historical perspective, since it documents in such detail the type of changes that were taking place and what was probably a common reaction to them among the more privileged classes. The daughters, although stereotypes, are still interesting figures, because Poole neither judges them nor paints them as all good or all bad; each of their viewpoints has merit. Clearly, though, Poole has the most affinity for Roger, a good man who did his best to raise and nurture his family.
Highly recommended.
Roger, now in his late 50s, is a New Englander who moved to the city as a young man and threw himself into its life. He owns a successful small business. A widower, his life revolves around his three daughters; he views himself as something of their protector and patriarch, even though all three are all of age. He is uncertain about the changes that he sees in New York, a city he loves. He raised his family in a traditional fashion, in a large home he owns. Now, all around him he feels pressed in by the apartment buildings that not only tower over his home but also seem to be populated with hundreds if not thousands of pairs of eyes of stranger, people whom he does not know—not really neighbors in the sense to which he is accustomed.
Edith, his oldest daughter, is married and the mother of 4, expecting a 5th child. She represents in the novel the traditional ways of ‘old’ New York—the pre-immigrant, slower way of life where the wife stayed at home, raised the children, and provided a comfortable, smooth-running home for her husband. Raised in privilege, used to servants, she views the newcomers with disdain, considering them undesirable. At one point in the book, she dismisses the idea of sending them to anything other than private schools for fear that her children will be forced to associate with “them”. She stands for tradition, for what is known and cherished, and all the values, both good and bad, that are associated with a woman’s traditional role in a family.
Deborah, the middle daughter, is of a totally different cut of cloth. A career woman and idealistic reformer, she heads a radically modern (for that day) school, coming into daily and intimate contact with immigrant children and their families. She sees at first hand their struggles and identifies strongly with them. She gives herself tirelessly to her work which is her life. Terrified of marriage and motherhood for fear that she will be then trapped and unable to continue her life’s work, she continually puts off marriage to Allan, a young doctor equally as idealistic as Deborah.
The third daughter, Laura, might as well have arrived from a different galaxy. She is the party girl, the forerunner of the flapper, whose gaiety fills the house and charms each of her family. Suddenly engaged and then married to an up-and-coming wealthy young businessman, Laura is the frivolous one, the grasshopper to Deborah’s and Edith’s hard-working ants.
World War I disrupts this family as it did so many others. Roger’s business falls on hard times, and the family is forced to cope in ways it has never imagined. The changes occurring in the city at large impose themselves on the family in an intimate way. Life changes irrevocably; each of the Gales adapts and grows in accordance with their characters.
This is another novel that really has no plot to speak of, but rather in its own way is a documentary of a white, upper middle-class family caught in overwhelming changes they can neither foresee nor prevent from impacting their lives no matter what their outlook. The story is told from Roger’s point of view, as he observes and reflects on the actions of his family and tries to reconcile it all. It is his book.
Of all the early Pulitzer Prize winners, I found Poole’s writing style the most dated. That doesn’t mean that the book was difficult, but it was slow-going in a way that, for example, The Magnificent Ambersons, published two years later, was not. Still, I found the story interesting, if not absorbing, from a historical perspective, since it documents in such detail the type of changes that were taking place and what was probably a common reaction to them among the more privileged classes. The daughters, although stereotypes, are still interesting figures, because Poole neither judges them nor paints them as all good or all bad; each of their viewpoints has merit. Clearly, though, Poole has the most affinity for Roger, a good man who did his best to raise and nurture his family.
Highly recommended.
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