1919: The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, Sherry's Review

The only other book I've read by Booth Tarkington was Penrod, a story about a mischievous boy growing up around the turn of the century. I remember it as funny and profound upon the subject of boyhood, kind of like Tom Sawyer.

The Magnificent Ambersons, aside from the time period, the early 1900's, and the setting, the American Midwest, is not at all like Penrod. As an under current in the book, Tarkington preaches about the general nastiness and inevitability of urban sprawl and how the automobile and the factory have destroyed community and cleanliness and all that makes life worthwhile. Preaching aside, Mr. Tarkington still manages to tell an engaging story, a sort of family epic, the rise and fall of the Ambersons.

Georgie Amberson Minafer is a spoiled rich brat, reared in luxury and with a sense of entitlement. The Ambersons, George's mother's family, are the center of society in their "Midland town." From the beginning of the novel, the author sets Georgie up for disaster; the entire town is waiting for George Amberson Minafer to get his "come-upance". As George grows up the reckoning is delayed again and again, but the most casual reader must know that George's pride goeth before a fall. George's favorite word for other people, all others who aren't Ambersons, is "riff-raff". His attitude can only and always be described as condescending, even with the young lady with whom he falls in love.

So, The Magnificent Ambersons is first of all a cautionary tale. Pride is destructive. Things change; no one stays on top forever. Fortunes come and go. Only those who are strong, wise, and flexible, and maybe even lucky, can persevere to enjoy the good life.

However, the book is not just a preachy, moralistic fable. It's a picture of life at the turn of the century, of how change affects different personalities. It's a love story about a mother who idolizes her son, and a young man who loves his family pride more than he cares for the woman who is willing to overlook many of his faults and who could have made him happy. And the ending is about forgiveness and hope and the possibility that broken things can be, if not mended, perhaps made new.

I've not seen the Orson Welles movie based on this book, but I plan to do so. After reading the novel, I can see how this books would make a great "old movie". No modern remakes, however, nowadays a writer and director would most likely ruin the movie version with gratuitous sex and a plot in which only the characters' names were borrowed from the original book.

A Work in Progress review of The Magnificent Ambersons.

1947: All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Sherry's Review

Once upon a time, about twenty-five years ago, I read a biography of Huey "Kingfish" Long, and I only remember the highlights: Huey ran Louisiana in the 1930's, was a populist to end all populists, had a proposed program called "Share the Wealth," and was assassinated by some guy who was in turn shot by Long's bodyguard(s). Robert Penn Warren's 1947 Pulitzer prize winning fictional account of the life and times of Willie Stark, popular governor of an unnamed Southern state, pretty much follows the general outline of what I remember of Long's career. However, it's been a long time, so I can't vouch for the details.

The book is much more than Huey Long renamed and fictionalized, however. It's an exploration of how power corrupts, of how we're all, as Willie says, "conceived in sin and born in corruption." The novel is misnamed. It's either about Willie and one of his men, the narrator, Jack Burden. Or it's about all the King's women ---his long-suffering wife, Lucy, his mistress, Sadie, and his upper class lover, Anne. For a Southern novel it's strangely silent on the subject of race and race relations. It seems that in the Louisiana of Willie Stark, black people are to be seldom seen and definitely not heard. It's the white voters who count, and Willie has a gift for making the poor white hicks of rural Louisiana feel as if they're an important part of the power structure. He's one of them, he says, a hick, too, raised up by God to lead them on to good roads, decent sanitation, free education, and universal health care. And he'll pay for it all by taxing the rich. Gee, haven't we all heard that speech before? Maybe old Huey/Willie has been reincarnated several times since the 1930's.

"For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?
Ambition, love, fear, money."

All the King's Men explores all of these motivations for sin and corruption. The novel's characters display the consequences of action and of inaction in a world in which the choices are between using evil means to create some possible (corrupt) good or remaining pure by not participating in the world, particularly the world of politics, at all. I think there is a Third Way, as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would have said, but perhaps I am mistaken. Or perhaps in Louisiana there are only two possibilities: become corrupted by the process or stand back and let the corrupt men rule the state.

2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson---Sherry's Review

Reverend John Ames is seventy-six years old, and he's been told that "his heart is failing." So he begins to write down his memories for his seven year old son, the product of a late and very happy marriage to a much younger woman. Reverend Ames starts out writing about his father and his grandfather and about his love for this life, his memories and his regrets. However, before long, he finds that he must deal with the unfinished business of forgiveness and letting go of the past. The book has several themes:

Fathers and Sons
'My father was a man who acted from principle, as he said himself. He acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it. But something in the way he went about it made him disappointing from time to time, and not just to me. I say this despite all the attention he gave to me bringing me up, for which I am profoundly in his debt, though he himself might dispute that. God rest his soul, I know for a fact I disappointed him. It is a remarkable thing to consider. We meant well by each other, too."

Heaven, Hell and Eternity
"If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don't hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul."

"I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence,the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets."

On Predestination and the Possibility that People Can Change
" . . . there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate."

"Your mother said, 'A person can change. Everything can change.' "

Faith and Doubt
"I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the moustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment."

I liked the quotations. Rev. Ames has a voice that reminds me of my father-in-law, a Southern Baptist country preacher who lived in our home before he died several years ago. (Interesting aside: I never figured out what denomination Rev. Ames belonged to, just that he was not Baptist, not Presbyterian, not Lutheran, not Quaker, and not Methodist. He believed ininfant baptism, though.)

However, the story itself was what kept me turning the pages of this memoir/novel. I wanted to know the "back story." How did Rev. Ames come to marry a woman more than thirty years younger than he was? What happened to his grandfather, an abolitionist who knew John Brown and who lost one eye in the Civil War? Why did his brother Edward go to Europe to study and come back an atheist? Can the characters in the book forgive those who disappoint them, especially can Rev. Ames forgive and extend grace to an old friend who may or may not be a repentant sinner? And how did John Ames retain his faith in God and in life itself?

Gilead has lots and lots of questions and even a few answers. I'm planning to read Ms. Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, published back in 1981, as soon as I can find it, and I'll read anything else she writes. This book was one of the best I've read in a very long time.

Cross-posted form Semicolon.

Sherry's Books Read

2005 - Gilead (Robinson) Semicolon review here.
1986 - Lonesome Dove (McMurtry) Well, sort of, at least I tried. Unappreciative Semicolon review of the part I finished.
1975 - The Killer Angels (Shaara) One of my Best Books Ever.
1967 - The Fixer (Malamud) I read this one a long time ago when my mom was taking a course in Jewish American literature.
1961 - To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) One of my Best Books Ever.
1953 - The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
1952 - The Caine Mutiny (Wouk)
1947 - All the King’s Men (Warren) Semicolon review here.
1937 - Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
1928 - The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder) This book made quite an impression when I read it about 30 years ago. I'm looking forward to re-reading it this fall.
1925 - So Big (Ferber)
1921 - The Age of Innocence (Wharton) One of my Best Books Ever.
1919 - The Magnificent Ambersons (Tarkington) Semicolon review here.

As for plans, I'm reading A Confederacy of Dunces (1981) right now, and I'd like to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2001) because my son likes it and I want to know why. I'll choose more if and when I finish those two. Since my daughter and, by extension, I are studying twentieth century history this school year, I might like to start at the bottom of the list and work up, reading along with the history wer're doing. I've never heard of His Family by Poole, the first book on the list.