The Saturday Morning Post (No. 170)

 

After reading Anne of Green Gables, The Hidden Garden, and The Little Princess, as well as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, what is left?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott C+

I have read that Miss Alcott did not really want to write this book. Her publisher did. She favored more livelier and exciting subjects. Nevertheless, write it she did, for the money. Even so, she felt that the first 100 pages were pretty boring, despite praise from other readers. I think she was right. However, the story did get more interesting as it went along, especially in volume two and her publisher proved to have known what readers wanted, as it is the book Alcott is remembered for. 

This book turned out to be something other than what I had expected. I have never seen any adaptation of the story, and knew its premise only vaguely - a number of girls living with their mother, who might have been a widow, in the 1860's. Thus, I was surprised to find that the complete story spanned something like eight years with the young girls growing up and having families of their own, as well as traveling to Europe and New York for extended stays. I won't spoil the rest of the story for you, as a lot happens over the course of it that I couldn't begin to summarize.

Perhaps what I found most interesting was that one of the sisters, Jo, is an aspiring writer, very much, I suspect a fictional Miss Alcott. Her struggles as a writer offer insights into what writing involved in the 1860's. It seems that one of the major components of serious novels was moralizing. When Jo was selling her gaudy stories to the newspapers, she had to strip out all the moralizing, which troubled her. Miss Alcott didn't have to do that for this book, anyway. For all I know, she may have skipped moralizing for the more adult adventures and melodramas that she wrote. However, in this story she liberally laced it with a lot of wholesome wisdom and moralizing reflecting the tastes of the time in worthwhile novels. I'm not complaining, just noting the fact.

As I mentioned, the first hundred pages or so are rather dry and episodic in nature, but as the story goes on, and especially in volume two, the writing gets more lively, and the characters deeper. There is, as usual with stories of this period, a lot of "telling" by the writer. But I did finish the story, which you can take as a stamp of approval, though I must admit I did not fall in love with it, as it seems so many readers have before me. I had to choose between a B- and C+ and well, recalling all those long passages of wisdom and sentimentality, opted for the latter

My second title this week is something I came across browsing the Gutenberg Project... I forget what I was looking for, but I read a chapter and decided to give another old book a try.

In Pawn by Ellis Parker Butler  C

Almost every book fades away a few years after it is published. A few, for some reason, remain read and so become classics. But are there books just as good and timely as the classics but that, for some reason, just fade away like ordinary books? 

Today we have one of those books and one of those authors, whose works have faded away. According to his scant Wikipedia entry, Ellis Parker Butler wrote something like 30 books and over 2000 short stories and other pieces for magazines and newspapers from the turn the last century to the mid-1930's. His work was published alongside Mark Twain and Edgar Rice Burroughs. This is not his most famous story, that being "Pigs is Pigs," which tells you just how fleeting fame is.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have found, from my rather slight acquaintance with the forgotten fiction of the first half of the 20th century, that these books are often weird in weird ways. There are things about the way they are written, what is written about, and the characters, that just seem strange today in ways that are hard for me to put my finger on. But they're there. The question is; were they also strange when they were written? And does that explain why they faded away? Or is it simply a matter of time and changes in society?

We have one such strange book today.

This story opens with a junk dealer Harvey Redding and his son Lem. The junk dealer is a character; fat and lazy, indeed, the laziest man in or near Riverbank Iowa. He has let his junk business wither on the vine from a lack of enterprise. He is portrayed as a comical character, who, after reading pulp stories and the lives of saints, decides to become a saint, since he can't see himself as a pulp story hero, but thinks he could be a saint living a simple life of good deeds and fasting. Owing $200 to his sister, he "pawns" Lem to her to look after in her boarding house, with the promise of using the money he saves on feeding him to pay her back from the $25 a month he receives from a trust his late wife set up for him from her modest fortune. If all of this sounds like a comic novel, it is. So far.

Next we meet the three lady teachers, two of which live at the boarding house of Harvey's sister. Being single, as teachers were required to be back in the day in a lot of places, and being too ill paid to live in their own houses, they boarded.

An aside; my dairy farmer grandparents boarded the male teacher of the one-room schoolhouse just down the road for a year, probably in the 1920's or early '30's. I guess grandma didn't like him around the house, so it was only for one year. Good grief, that was a century ago. Time flies.

Not that single people could work all day and come home to do all the work that was needed to keep a household running back in those days. So they must live at home with their parents or in a boarding house until they got married and become or acquire a housewife to look after the house, and if possible a servant to help her. 

In any event, one of these teachers, Henrietta Bates, is lively, attractive, and pleasant, 40 year old, who is very romantic, and addicted to telling lies about her imaginary romance. She even borrows money from the other two teachers, in part to pay for the gifts that her fictional fiancé supposedly sends her. So far, still light fiction.

But living at the boarding house is a very nasty young man. The story goes on to recount events that develop around him, Lem, and Henrietta, all of which leads to a great deal of unpleasant drama in the boarding house, which is not comedic at all. And yet, even with these events, there are slightly comic characters woven in and out of the story, from a wise old judge, refugee Jews from Russia, and a shop owner who's family is a big name in town an boasts that he always gets what he wants.

So you have, in this story, a strange collection of rather dark drama and comic characters mixed helter-skelter together in one story. And to top it all off, you have a chapter where the author steps out from behind the curtain to muse on some of the issues of the character he's writing about, and to explain the back story of Henrietta.

This mish-mash makes the story rather weird, fitting no one pattern. While this might seem like a plus, the situation and the characters seem, well just weird. I'm not sure this weirdness comes from me being so remote from the time and place this was written, or if this story would have seemed out of the ordinary back in 1921 when it was published. And if this strangeness is perhaps why the story faded away. All I can say is that so far in my reading of these obscure books from a hundred years ago, there is usually something about them, a strangeness, that is hard to pin down, but is present, nevertheless.