So in my quest to read more American literature I've started with two very different authors. I've just finished Willa Cather's My Antonia, and loved it. I think my high school English teacher would be proud of me as she constantly urged us to read Willa Cather and in particular My Antonia. It took a few years and more urges along the way (how many lists of books I want to read did it appear on and how many people told me I would like it?). It was an easy read, though not without depth. Why I waited so long to read it is beyond me, but you know how that happens sometimes. More about it later.
John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle was my other choice. It was a completely random selection based mostly on the fact that I've enjoyed some of his short stories, and I liked the idea of reading about an eccentric New England family ca. 1953. He's a good writer, but I am finding it a little challenging. Now, what does 'good' mean? Can't you just tell when a story flows along unselfconsciously? His prose style seems very polished, but it's also very dense with lots of descriptive passages and solid paragraphs with not a lot of dialogue. It's a book that requires time to get into and isn't one I can just read a few pages here and there, I'm finding.
Although it is ostensibly about the Wapshot family, a family with strong roots and of sailing stock, it is also a character study about the people who reside in the fictional town of St. Botolphs. Several chapters in and not a lot has happened really and I'm not sure how the plot is going to develop, but I'm curious enough to keep going to see what happens. I rarely do this, but I had to take a look at what Amazon reviewers made of the book and it seems that readers either love his work or unapologetically deride it. It's too early to tell which side of the line I'm going to fall, though I want to keep an open mind as I'm reading. The whole idea is to read a variety of American authors to get a taste of styles and (hopefully) concentrate on those that are considered the 'best of the best' (a rather elastic term I know).
I want to share a snippet, but the snippets are all pretty long and hard to take out of context, so I'll start at the beginning.
"St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town. It had been an inland port in the great days of the Massachusetts sailing fleets and now it was left with a factory that manufactured table silver and a few other small industries. The natives did not consider that it has diminished in size or importance, but the long roster of the Civil War dead, bolted to the cannon on the green, was a reminder of how populous the village had been in the 1860s. St. Botolphs would never muster as many soldiers again. The green was shaded by a dew great elms and loosely enclosed by a square of store fronts. The Cartwright Block, which made the western wall of the square, had along the front of its second story a row of lancet windows, as delicate and reproachful as the windows of a church. Behind those windows were the offices of the Easter Star, Dr Bulstrode the dentist, the telephone company and the insurance agent. The smells of these offices--the smell of dental preparations, floor oil, spittoons and coal gas--mingled in the downstairs hallway like an aroma of the past. In a drilling autumn rain, in a world of much change, the green of St. Botolphs conveyed an impression of the unusual permanence. On Independence day in the morning, when the parade had begun to form, the place looked prosperous and festive."
Willa Cather and John Cheever are only two of a list of American authors I want to read. This is the beginnings of my working list, the majority of which I've never read. A very few are rereads. Forgive me for not linking to them. Obviously this is something to whittle away at over time. Who am I missing?--I'm looking for 'quintessential' American authors. In no particular order:
- Wallace Stegner--Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose
- Philip Roth--American Pastoral
- Sue Miller--The Good Mother
- Anne Tyler--Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Saint Maybe
- Jane Smiley--Thousand Acres
- Don Delillo--White Noise
- Truman Capote--In Cold Blood
- Edith Wharton--The House of Mirth (and other novels as well!)
- Henry James--The Portrait of a Lady
- William Maxwell--They Came Like Swallows and The Chateau
- Thoreau--Walden (have never read the whole thing)
- John Steinbeck--Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath
- Joyce Carol Oates--We Were the Mulvaneys
- Richard Yates--Revolutionary Road (and other novels)
- Maritta Wolff--Whistle Stop and Night Shift
- Kate Chopin--The Awakening
- Edna Ferber--So Big
- Ward Just--An Unfinished Season
- John Updike--Marry Me
- Grace Metalius--Peyton Place
- Ernest Hemingway--The Sun Also Rises (and other novels)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald--The Beautiful and the Damned
Just so you won't think I am a complete lost cause I have read works by a lot of these authors (just different books than I list above)--Capote, Wharton, James, Maxwell, Thoreau, Steinbeck (only short stories), Wolff, Chopin, Updike and Hemingway, and I know I am leaving off lots of classic authors, but I had to start somewhere and these authors/works simply came to mind first. Seeing a list like this that isn't even complete feels a little insurmountable. Oh well, one book finished and another in progress and who will be up next?