... the grandeur of the Amberson family was instantly conspicuous as a permanent thing: it was impossible to doubt that the Ambersons were entrenched, in their nobility and riches, behind polished and glittering barriers which were as solid as they were brilliant, and would last.

If only, if only . . .

How do you enjoy a 300+ page book with a protagonist who is an arrogant, petulant, jackwad with no obviously redeeming qualities for the first 300 pages? Well, it's tough. But if it's as well told as The Magnificent Ambersons, it's possible.

Sure, that's a little bit of a spoiler -- George Amberson Minafer does develop a couple of redeeming qualities in the last 30 pages or so. But you know what? The book is almost a century old, you've had plenty of time to read it if you're worried about spoilers.

The plot is straightforward: At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, an impossibly rich family produces an arrogant twit as the only heir. Unbeknownst to him, the economy is changing and the family is beginning to fall on hard times. Too proud to admit it, they continue living as if they have all the money in the world. Meanwhile, the twit falls for a girl who's humble, kind, and wise. For some inexplicable reason, she falls for him, too. Things happen, they don't get together and the bottom falls out on the Ambersons. There's family drama, too -- between the financial crisis, health problems, love, old flames, and scandal, there's plenty to entertain a reader (if they can put up with younger George).

Most of the characters are pretty thin -- there are exceptions (George's mother, aunt and non-ambassador uncle, are the best) -- but even the developed ones aren't as fleshed out as we would have them today. But it fits with Tarkington's overall style. It's very, very difficult to like most of the people on these pages. So the ones you'd normally sort-of like, you end up really enjoying.

What makes this book work is Tarkington's style. It's hard to describe -- highly detailed (for example, there's so much attention paid to clothing and fashion that you'd almost think Gail Carriger had a hand in this), with a dry sense of humor, and plenty of cultural commentary. He changes his focus repeatedly: he'll jusmp months or years at at time, and summarize events from those months in a paragraph or less and then cover a single evening in 15 pages, so he can highlight what matters and ignore the rest. But better than the plot (or characters), you get lines like this: "Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady." How do you not keep reading for things like that?

Tarkington takes time out from the narrative to say

Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent. Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers; young people will not come to see such a play, because, for them, middle-aged lovers are a joke--not a very funny one. Therefore, to bring both the middle-aged people and the young people into his house, the manager makes his romance as young as he can. Youth will indeed be served, and its profound instinct is to be not only scornfully amused but vaguely angered by middle-age romance.

I assume that captures the spirit of the late 19^th/early 20^th Century -- if you take out the word "play" and put in "film" or "show," it does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the early 21^st Century, too. Which is a pretty nice achievement for a piece of writing.

The book isn't a chronicle of the changes to the American culture/economy due to industrialization, it's a family drama. But if you pay attention to what's going around the lovebirds, cads and gossips, you can see those changes taking place. It's a temptation for someone to cheat a little when writing historical fiction and make characters seem smarter than they are by knowing how predictions would actually turn out, Takington's not above falling into that. Note what Eugene Morgan, early designer of automobiles says:

"With all their speed forward [automobiles] may be a step backward in civilization--that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"

That was 98 years ago, think what he'd say now about the automobile's impact on culture (he'd probably cite James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere).

A dull(ish) story, full of unsympathetic characters acting foolishly (on the whole), with a quaint writing style that somehow makes it all work. I can't explain it, I'm just glad I read it. You just might feel the same way, give it a shot.

Knulp by Herman Hesse

Knulp is intelligent and witty and everyone likes him, but he has turned his back on having a career or a home or any of the conventional trappings of success. Instead he travels around, sleeping in fields and visiting friends. Because he’s so happy and charming, he has friends all over, and they’re all happy to shelter their vagrant pal for a little while. The novel was told from several different points of view and depicts different periods in Knulp’s life. As he gets older, it becomes clear that sleeping rough has taken its toll and that Knulp is not long for this world. He revisits his home town, which I found very touching. Then he has a philosophical conversation with god about his purpose in life, before lying down in the snow to sleep. The god business is SO not my kind of thing, but it was actually really well-done and I found it quite moving. The “cheerful wanderer” seems to be a “type” from this period. (For example, Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy is constantly talking about The Beloved Vagabond, but I don’t think I will ever read it because it is from 1906 and I’m certainly not going to make it to 2106.) This type is valorized in Knulp, but skewered in another book of 1916, I Pose.

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle

A top-drawer Sherlock Holmes novel! It has Professor Moriarty, a secret society, a long backstory, lots of contradictory clues... you can’t ask for more.

Emma McChesney and Co. by Edna Ferber

The longtime fans of my reviews (like, um, my brother and no one else) will remember that I adore Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney series. So I’m not even sure how good this book even is, all I know is that I loved it. The best part is how closely this novel mirrors my recent life. Emma McChesney travels to Bahia and Rio, Brazil—just like me! Then she goes to Buenos Aires, Argentina—just like me! Then she meets Miss Morrissey—just like me! Oh no wait, that didn’t happen to me. Anyway, after a triumphant voyage selling a line of petticoats, she returns home and finally deigns to marry T.A. Buck, the head of the petticoat company who’s been courting her for the last two books. Then she spends three months in marital idleness, shopping on Fifth Avenue and attending important dinners, but she can’t stand it and returns to work at the petticoat company. This was a very subversive message for 1915, but Edna Ferber slides it right down your throat before you’ve even noticed. The most fun part is when a dowdy rich girl comes to the factory to lecture the shop girls on dressing respectably, but instead a nice Jewish working girl gives the rich girl tips on clothes and advises her to marry the poor man she loves. Unfortunately, it looks like this is the last Emma McChesney book.

Polyanna Grows Up by Eleanor H. Porter

Remember how bad Miss Billy Married was? So actually I didn’t read the famous one last year, Pollyanna, just this sequel. Polyanna is an inspirational little orphan girl who has been cured of some kind of disability, and has been sent to cheer up a bitter old rich lady. Polyanna is continually playing “the Glad Game,” where no matter what kind of horrible thing has just happened, she will find something to be grateful for. This drives everyone totally bonkers, obviously, but eventually they all swallow the Kool Aid and become incredibly cheerful in the face of life’s adversity. Polyanna is mono-maniacally focused on her Game, so that she comes across as a bit unhinged. A sign of trauma?

Just this very day, my wife was telling me about a concept of acceptance she learned about from an Enneagram teacher named David Daniels, called an attitude of gratitude. But you’re not supposed to concur, condone, or capitulate to bad things that are happening. Polyanna is concurring, condoning, and capitulating all over the place. I’m not sure if I can explain what I mean, but there’s a reason Polyanna is one of the most infamously annoying characters in literature.

Polyanna finds an orphan boy with a disability for the bitter old rich lady to adopt. The lady thinks he might be her missing nephew but she can’t be sure; however, she decides she loves him either way.

Then we fast forward ten or twelve years and our author is presented with a problem. It’s cute (maybe) to have a child constantly playing the Glad Game, but in an adult it would be insufferable. Eleanor Porter actually does a pretty good job of turning Polyanna into a semi-normal human being, considering the situation Porter had created for herself.

Now the book gets a little bit fun, as a few love triangles develop, with many comical misunderstandings about who’s in love with whom, à la Three’s Company. There’s a part that’s really bizarre where Polyanna is almost gored by a wild boar (I think I’ve got this right.) But the one who really suffers from this mishap is the orphan boy with the disability, now also all grown up, because he was unable to rescue her, and he makes a big production out of it. Like many children’s book authors of this era, Porter really has a bee in her bonnet about disability. In the end, everything is sorted out—the orphans all come into their rightful inheritance and everyone is paired off with the right person.

I Pose by Stella Benson

I had high hopes when I began this novel as it has a strong opening. It’s about a highminded young vagabond known only as “the gardener” (because he tells people some claptrap about how the world is his garden) and a woman known only as “the suffragette.” The author explains frankly that these people are poseurs who don’t know how to be their true selves, and they wander the world disapproving of everyone and trying to be avant garde, unable to have authentic relationships with anyone, including themselves. I guess there have always been people like this, and there are certainly still people like that today. The author also promises that even though one of the main characters is a sufragette, it’s not “one of those books,” which made me feel relieved after my bad experience with Delia Blanchflower last year. But she lied! It is one of those books.

I Pose completely falls apart when the characters alight on a Caribbean island that is an English colony. This is the most racist book I have ever encountered—it makes Tarzan of the Apes and Penrod look real good. Reading this novel, I felt unclean. I don’t really want to get into the details, but I will say, I think a lot of times people have this idea that racist English people from a century ago were just old-fashioned but meant no harm; it was all kind of a misunderstanding, god love ‘em. I Pose makes it clear that this rosy assessment is not the case—one hundred years ago, racists hated black people with vicious cruelty and made fun of everything they could think of about them and literally did not care if they lived or died.

There was a kinda interesting part at the end where the suffragette goes into a poor neighborhood in London and tries to get the women to unionize, leave their alcoholic and abusive husbands, etc. but all her schemes backfire. This bit seemed heartfelt and true to life. Now I’m going to go ahead and spoil the ending, since I don’t recommend this book anyway. The gardener and the suffragette decide to get married, but instead, the suffragette shouts, “I hate god!” and runs into the church and blows it up, killing herself. The end. What??

I looked up Stella Benson on Wikipedia to see what was her deal, anyway, and it turns out she was a feminist and a suffragette (it wasn’t clear from the novel which side she was on) and that she lived all over the world, including China and Vietnam. From her bio I would think oh, I can’t wait to read a book by this neglected woman writer but having read this novel I say, never again, Stella Benson, you deserve to be forgotten.

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

This book was a lot of fun, however you will not be surprised to learn that it is marred by horrible racism toward Africans. Things that might surprise you about the world of Tarzan:

1. apes have fangs
2. apes eat lots of big game
3. Tarzan had an innate sensibility that stopped him from eating humans
4. although Tarzan could not speak, having been raised by apes, he learned to read and write English by looking at books

Tarzan fell in love with Jane, and rescued her (and everyone else in her party) from terrible danger, and behaved like a complete gentleman to her. He left her love notes, however she did not understand that they were from him, since she did not know he could read and write. Then Tarzan found someone to teach him to speak. Unfortunately he was taught to speak French! His one aim was to go to Baltimore where Jane was, and on the way he learned to eat cooked food with a knife and fork, speak English, etc. He arrived just in the nick of time to rescue Jane from a terrible fire. Unfortunately Jane had just gotten engaged to be married to another guy because she and her father were broke, but Tarzan threatened the guy into breaking the engagement, and Tarzan also gave Jane and her father a big treasure chest of gold. Then Jane decided that although she loved Tarzan, she’d better marry someone else because Tarzan was too wild. When Tarzan proposed, Jane realized she wanted to marry him after all but she’s just agreed to marry Tarzan’s cousin. Then Tarzan got the result of his fingerprint analysis (don’t ask) that proved he was the real Lord Greystoke. But since Jane was going to marry the supposed Lord Greystoke, Tarzan nobly suppressed this information, and told people that he was the son of a human woman and an ape. I know I’ve focused a lot on Jane, but this book was mostly swinging on ropes and adventure and killing and other good clean fun.

These two covers are surprisingly similar, yes?

The Titan by Theodore Dreiser

I really enjoyed Dreiser’s other books Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, but didn’t like this one so much. I’m only now learning that this is a sequel to a previous book, which makes me feel kind of stupid. It’s about a man named Cowperwood who wants to become really rich and successful. At the opening of the book, he’s just getting out of the penitentiary for stock exchange fraud or something along that line. His mistress Aileen has been waiting for him. He moves to Chicago, divorces his wife, marries Aileen, and makes a ton of money by hook or by crook buying up the streetcar system and other concerns. The financial/political part was not very appealing to me but that’s just a matter of taste. The one element that was interesting to me was how much homo-eroticism plays into business and finance in this book. All these different men meet Cowperwood and are magnetised by how handsome and charismatic and commanding he is, and they end up supporting him in his schemes. The back of the book promises that his every triumph will become a hollow defeat, but they read as hollow to me all the way through.

Cowperwood cheats on Aileen with a lot of different women, but the one he is really in love with he has known since she was a teen, which is pretty gross. Aileen is angry and decides she will cheat too to get back at Cowperwood and picks out an idle society man. When she invites the man to her house, he date rapes her. They end up “having an affair,” but Cowperwood doesn’t care. Aileen is also disappointed that she’s not a social success. Cowperwood was a pretty unlikeable character.

Even though the Enneagram (a personality typing system) is not really my thing, I couldn’t help seeing Cowperwood as a 3 with a 4 wing (because all he cares about is status and success, but he has an artistic side.) So I kept trying to picture him as David Bowie, a legendary 3 with a 4 wing, to make myself like him more, but it didn’t work. At the end of the book, Aileen slits her wrists and Cowperwood stops her and scolds her. He resolves to avoid her as much as possible in the future and decides that she won’t try again. I feel Dreiser’s female characters are more real and easier to relate to, which is probably why I enjoyed those other two books. So you can imagine how surprised I was to read in the afterword that Cowperwood was very similar to Dreiser himself and that Dreiser’s women characters are “unconvincing.” My other complaint about this book is that there are one million minor characters and they all have funny names. But I have to take my hat off to Dreiser for not being a racist as so many other writers of 1914 are. He has a couple of Jewish characters who speak with an accent, but not offensively so, and they are no more money-grubbing than every other single character in the book.

Booklikes has a really strange search engine. Why would it only link to a copy of this book that has a weird picture on the cover of Dutch men from the wrong century? This is a better cover!

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

This book, the exact opposite of The Titan, was completed in 1910 but published posthumously, as the Irish author died of TB at the age of 40 a year later. It’s an unabashedly socialist novel that follows the lives of a group of English working men. They earn poverty wages and live in constant fear of being unemployed. While a lot of conditions described in the book seem as true of the working poor today as a century ago, the one striking difference is that there was no safety net whatsoever. If the men were out of work for too long, they and their families would literally starve to death, and the only alternative was going to the workhouse, which is not really described in this novel but seems to be feared as an equivalent fate to death. The most harrowing part is when one of men believes he should murder his wife and bright young son and then himself to spare them a worse fate, and is mulling over the best way to do it. That was Stephen King-level horror. There are a lot of long speeches about socialism that are meritorious but boring and I ended up skimming through them. It was mostly this one guy Owen making the speeches, but the other men dismissed him as a nut. I think this book deserves its status as a classic.

Arcadian Adventures With The Idle Rich by Steven Leacock

Satirical short story collection about the lives of the American upper class. I enjoyed this one. I think my favorite story was about a pretend guru who gathers bored rich women to learn his “oriental” wisdom and then makes off with their jewelry. Or maybe it was the one about the great financial genius who turns out to be a country man who knows nothing and just struck it rich by accident and just wishes he could get back to his old home.

The Last War (also known as The World Set Free) by H.G. Wells

The most notable thing about this sf novel is that in 1914 Wells predicted atomic energy and atomic warfare. It’s too bad no one heeded his warning. In fact it seems his ideas inspired the scientists who worked on the atom bomb. This is the only book of 1914 I encountered that admitted the possibility of a war that would kill millions, even as such a war got underway. This book doesn’t have a plot or main characters in a traditional way. It’s a history book from the future, and the first chapter (the “prelude”) covers actual history. The rest of the book covers the development of atomic power which essentially creates free energy that destroys the world economy, and then atomic war destroys all the major cities, killing everyone and leaving a radioactive landscape. However, after that the book becomes remarkably upbeat as the survivors create a world government that unifies the planet. You get snapshots of life from different people throughout the book. Other than a kind of dismissive attitude toward India, this book isn’t even racist. The edition I read had an actually interesting introduction, by Greg Bear, comparing Henry James and Wells, who were frenemies. Bear says that this was the moment when speculative fiction and literary fiction parted ways. Spec fic (along with my bff Arnold Bennett) was dismissed as trying to get people to believe in something and too action/plot oriented. Literary fiction was elevated for being sexless, bloodless, and more about money and people’s inner lives than stuff happening. Bear puts forward the non-dual POV that there’s no reason these two styles had to be opposed to each other. Anyway, I thought it was notable that this was one of the few books of 1914 that has been reprinted by a reputable press with attention paid to the book design—because actual normal humans might want to read this book.

Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man by Sinclair Lewis

This was Sinclair Lewis’ first published book for grown-ups. It was about a milquetoast kind of guy who lives not far from where I grew up in NYC who quits his job and travels to Europe looking for adventure. But he’s actually a pretty bourgeois guy so he doesn’t want too much adventure. He meets a young bohemian woman who seemed just like the kind of unreliable bright young thing you would still meet today. She was probably my favorite part of the book because she was so vivid and realistic. But when Mr. Wrenn gets back to NYC it seems to him that he’d be better off with a more normal young lady—like this nice girl he’s just met. The downfall of this book: racism. I did enjoy it when I read it but it was strangely forgettable. I brought it on a trip with me thinking I hadn’t read it yet and I was dumbfounded when I opened it up and realized I’d just read it a few weeks earlier. But what’s to blame here, the book? Or the lack of cover art? Or my demented mind?

Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphrey Ward

I enjoyed Mrs. Ward’s 1913 offering, but this anti-suffragette novel was hard to take. The eponymous character is a rich, beautiful, and charismatic young woman whose father has just died. But instead of inheriting her fortune outright, she’s been saddled with a guardian/trustee because her dying father correctly believed that she would devote all her money and all her to life to the cause of woman’s suffrage if she had control. Of course the guardian is a magnificent unmarried middle-aged man who is handsome, noble, etc etc, and sparks fly between him and Delia Blanchflower. Delia is under the sway of an unscrupulous older suffragette. They live together and are devoted to each other. Although it’s explained that the older woman only wants Delia’s money for the cause and doesn’t really care about her, she appears to get jealous of the guardian and basically cuts Delia off. There was a lot of stuff about how their group was blowing up mailboxes, which seemed ridiculous to me, but it turns out that suffragettes really did blow up mailboxes. One woman complains about how her former servant was sick and dying and wrote a letter to her, but it was blown up, so the servant died thinking her mistress didn’t care about her. (I learned from this book that the most important part of noblesse oblige is taking care of your servants when they’re sick.)

There are a number of anti-suffrage women role model characters in the book, and also a woman who believe that women should get the vote, but she doesn’t care if it’s in her lifetime or her daughter’s lifetime or neither, and that it’s wrong for women to do anything except patiently wait for the vote. The stuff that these women say makes absolutely no sense and reminds me of the stuff that people say today that makes absolutely no sense. It’s not about content, it’s about being dignified and an upstanding member of society. People just want everything to be comfy and pleasant. Anyway, there’s a beautiful old historic home that the suffragettes want to blow up (I’m assuming this is based on Lloyd George’s home that really was bombed) and in the end even though Delia and her guardian try to prevent it, the wicked suffragette lady sets it on fire, killing a little disabled girl who has no function in this book other than to be sacrificed—and the suffragette lady dies too. Is this book racist? Of course. Here’s a sample line: “From her face and figure the half savage, or Asiatic note, present in the physiognomy and complexions of her brothers and sisters, was entirely absent.”

Personality Plus by Edna Ferber

This was the most disappointing book of 1914 for me. I really loved Roast Beef Medium last year and this is the sequel. But I could tell Edna was just phoning it in. It’s about Emma McChesney’s son going into the advertising industry and triumphing. But you can tell Edna Ferber didn’t know anything about the advertising industry so there’s a curious lack of substance to it. It’s okay, Edna, I still believe in you! I see there’s another sequel next year and I bet that one is going to be great!

Penrod by Booth Tarkington

I read most of this. It’s fairly funny, about a little boy who gets into different scrapes. Think Otis Spofford. But it’s also pervasively racist, with many casual racial epithets for African-Americans, and talk of “Congo man eaters.” I got to a part where Penrod makes friends with three African-American brothers. One has a speech impediment, one is missing a finger, and I forget what was the deal with the third brother. Penrod decides he’s going to open a freak show starring the three brothers. I just couldn’t take it anymore and brought the book back to the library. I think the fact that it’s a children’s book is what makes it the most awful.

Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France

I only made it through a couple chapters of this book before I ran out of time. It seems good so far. No angels have appeared yet. It’s just some family history and a description of a library. Speaking of libraries, this book is not due back at the library for another two weeks so we’ll see how I do.

The World full of Lies
A review on Booth Tarkington’s Alic Adams


Title: Alice Adams
Author: Booth Tarkington
Rank: 87th book in 2014

Plot movement: 2stars
Entertainment Factor: 1star
Characters: 1star
Writing Style: 3stars
Details: 3stars
Provoking: 3stars
Worldly Relevance: 4stars
Suspense: 1star
Conclusion: 1star
Emotion: 1star