A Work in Progress

1924 Club: So Big by Edna Ferber

I think I have a winner!  A closer look at my shelves netted me a copy of Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize wining novel, So Big.  I've always meant to read her and I can't tell you how long I've had this book on my shelves.  I think the stars have aligned in just the right way, don't you think?

Here's a little teaser to give you a taste of her writing and what I'm in store for story-wise.  This is a description of Selina, of whose "travails" the novel follows:

"She read absorbedly books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public libraries as the times afforded.  She was alone for hours a day, daily.  Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among them in a sort of gourmand's ecstasy of indecision.  In this way, at fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Felicia Hemans.  Not to speak of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the Fireside Companion, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together as inevitably as steak and onions.  These last were, of course, the result of Selina's mode of living, and were loaned to her by kind-hearted landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to New York."

Motherless and with a father fond of gambling that is how Selina is raised--on the road.  I do like her upon our first meeting.  I especially understand that ecstasy of indecision.  Oh, how I suffer from it, too.

All in all, a very promising start I will say.

A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor

In Peter Taylor's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Summons to Memphis, it's the vagaries of memory that is explored so brilliantly.  What makes this, for me, not just a good story but a great story is how Phillip Carver comes to terms with his past, how over the course of the story he not only begins to understand but also accepts the events of his childhood and youth and how they shaped him and his two older sisters.  And there's not just just acceptance of the past but forgiveness of those he has all his life perceived as being the source of his (and his sisters') unhappiness.  The telling of this tale makes me think of a kaleidoscope.  With each turn the shapes shift to create a new pattern out of the old one.  

"The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved--especially when there are unmarried daughters.  This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-odd years ago.  At least it is a certainty that remarriage was more difficult for old widowers in Memphis than it was over in Nashville, say, or Knoxville--or even Chattanooga, for that matter.  One needs to know those other cities only slightly to be absolutely sure of this.  Yet one cannot say with equal certainty just why the difficulty was so peculiar to Memphis, unless it is that Memphis , unlike other Tennessee cities, remains to this day a 'land-oriented' place.  Nearly everybody there who is anybody is apt to own some land.  He owns it in Arkansas or West Tennessee or in the Mississippi Delta.  And it may be that whenever or wherever land gets involved, any family matter is bound to become more complex, less reasonable, more desperate."

It all begins with a phone call.  Two calls actually.  Phillip Carver is an antiquarian bookseller living in New York City when his older sisters Betsy and Josephine call with the news that his widowed father is remarrying a younger woman.  When their father first began socializing after the death of his wife, a woman he was dedicated to, it was looked upon indulgently by his daughters, even encouraged.  But when the choice of women becomes younger and things become serious, the two step in and try and put an end to things.  And Phillip is summoned to Memphis to help.

It's over this framework that Phillip Carver relates his story.  His recollections of people and place are often presented from varying angles, with each successive telling a little more detail is added to the picture created out of these memories until a fuller and more complete picture is presented.  In 1931 the Carver family moved from Nashville to Memphis after scandalous dealings with a business partner leave the Carvers broke.  Phillip's father, a distinguished and well respected lawyer, genteel but very formidable, decides to reinvent himself in a new place after the humiliation wrought upon him by his friend and business partner. 

His decision, however, has repercussions for each member of the family.  Phillip's mother has always lived in Nashville.  After a brief flourishing in her new town she succumbs to illness and is ever after bedridden.  George, Phillip's brother, is something of a black sheep and continues down his own lonely and self-destructive path which will end on the battlefields of Europe in the 40s.  At the time of the family's move to Memphis Betsy is practically engaged and it's all but assumed that she will soon enough return to Nashville as a bride, Jo to eventually follow in her footsteps.  And for Phillip, just a boy still, his sense of importance and burgeoning independence as well as his feelings of contentedness are dashed when his father picks up stakes for a new city.

While Mr. Carver thrives in Memphis, not so very far from where he grew up, each of his children's hopes and desires seems to come to nought, helped along by Mr. Carver himself it would seem.  He has a hand in each child's life and promise for happiness, breaking up relationships that he sees as being unworthy or below the family name.  None of the three go on to marry, and while Betsy and Jo appear dedicated to their father, having remained close to home while aiding Phillip in his escape to New York, it's apparent as the story rolls out that at the heart of their later manipulations are long-standing grudges.  They place the blame for their failed relationships firmly on the shoulders of their father and see that any hope for happiness with second wife are destroyed.  

This is such a wonderfully rich story.  I love this kind of storytelling.  There truly is a story to tell, pieced together but done so vividly.  Each character is fully formed, almost as though they are really flesh and blood and filled with emotions that are palpable.  And with flaws that feel very real and believable.  In those opening lines Phillip talks of that so important land.

". . . one cannot say with equal certainty just why the difficulty was so peculiar to Memphis, unless it is that Memphis , unlike other Tennessee cities, remains to this day a 'land-oriented' place.  Nearly everybody there who is anybody is apt to own some land."

Is there a fear between Betsy and Jo that a lifetime spent unmarried and taking care of their father will be rewarded by their inheritance being frittered away instead on this new, young wife?  Or is there some deeper animosity at play?  The summons to Memphis, such an ordinary reaction by grown children in just such a situation, gives Phillip fodder for his memories and a reason to analyze them finally after forty years spent away from his childhood home.

It was William McPherson's exceptional Testing the Current which pointed me in the direction of Peter Taylor (adding him to my lists of 'great new finds' and author's whose work I must explore further).  The two are similar in that they have a nostalgic feel to them, and tell stories of a certain class of people at a certain time in America.  Now I must go back and see which other books were referenced in the afterword in the McPherson novel.  Peter Taylor has been compared to Eudora Welty, James Agee and Walker Percy, so I'll be looking up their work next.  I can very enthusiastically recommend A Summons to Memphis to you!

Teaser Tuesday: A Summons to Memphis

One book leads to another.

I finished reading William McPherson's Testing the Current over the weekend.  I loved it.  If I can find a little energy this week (I'm afraid I am feeling under the weather and am fighting off a cold) I am going to finish writing about it in the next day or two.  I wondered as I was reading whether I would ever get to the end (not in a bad way, but in a, 'wow' this book has tiny print and I don't ever seem to make much progress kind of way), but now that I am done I feel a little at loose ends and despondent--wishing I still was lost in the story.

Sometimes it's best to pick up a new book that is vastly different and set off on a new reading path, but as several books of similar tone and style were mentioned in the afterword, and one of them is Peter Taylor's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Summons to Memphis . . .   I have found my next library read. 

I've only just brought it home and will start reading tonight.  Here's a little teaser from the beginning.

"The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved--especially when there are unmarried daughters.  This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-odd years ago.  At least it is a certainty that remarriage was more difficult for old widowers in Memphis than it was over in Nashville, say, or in Knoxville--or even in Chattanooga, for that matter.  One needs to know those other cities only slightly to be absolutely sure of this.  Yet one cannot say with equal certainty just why the difficulty was so peculiar to Memphis, unless it is that Memphis, unlike the other Tennessee cities, remains to this day a 'land-oriented' place.  Nearly everybody there who is anybody is apt to own some land.  He owns it in Arkansas or in West Tennessee or in the Mississippi Delta.  And it may be that whenever or wherever land gets involved, any family matter is bound to become more complex, less reasonable, more desperate."

The summons to Memphis comes upon the remarriage of the narrator's father.  This is a story of "revenge, resolution, and redemption."  I'm already looking forward to it.

Somehow this puts me in mind of Eudora Welty, but perhaps only because they are both Southern writers.  I read Welty's The Optimist's Daughter last year and was suitably impressed by her.  I've not read much of her work, aside from an essay and a story or two, but this is a reminder, too, that I want to read more by her.  Maybe Southern writers in general and this sort of story in particular will end up being my next reading path.

Do you do readalikes?  Or do you prefer each book be different from the last one read?