What We've Got Here Is A Failure to Communicate

When I was a little girl I loved the Little House on the Prairie books. And I mean, I loved them a lot. I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder. One summer I dressed up practically every day in a long skirt that belonged to my mom and wore the bonnet that I got when my third grade class visited the one room schoolhouse at Greenfield Village and I just pretended, all day long, that I lived in Laura's world. I must have read each of the seven Little House books three or four times apiece. So it's not surprising that now, twenty years on from my days of prairie pretending, I find myself enjoying grown up stories of American prairie life.

Our sixth Pulitzer winner is The Able McLaughlins, by Margaret Wilson, and it is essentially a love story about Wully (short for William) McLaughlin and Chirstie McNair, who live with their respective Scottish-American families on the prairie in the "middle west" in the 1860s. Where exactly the "middle west" is located I'm not sure; at times I thought maybe Iowa, but at one point a character 'goes west' and then there is talk about him being in Chicago. So maybe it's Ohio? Somewhere with big wide open spaces. But I digress. Wully returns home injured from fighting for the Union Army in the Civil War and falls immediately (and I literally mean immediately) for Chirstie. He has to return to the service of the military to fulfill his commitment though, and when he comes home for good he finds Christie's behavior toward him greatly changed.

Book #6: The Able McLaughlins aka Kissing Cousins

I was dreading reading this book at first because I thought it was going to be another plodding story about an infuriatingly silly American family. Clearly, I was prejudging based on the title which reminded me way too much of The Magnificent Amberson. I was dreading this book so much that I was trying to find excuses to skip it or even abandon the project entirely! Ha! However, Maria texted me a picture of the back cover of her copy and my interest was peaked. The exact content of my reply was: "Blah blah blah, farm, blah blah blah frontier, blah blah blah oh! Conflict of old world customs. Okay that part sounds promising."


Sadly, there wasn't much in the way of "conflict of old world customs" but that in no way meant the book didn't have plenty to offer in other ways.

Book #5: One of Ours

This book was really two very distinct but related stories. In hindsight, I guess they did need to be told as one. To start you have a young man who is struggling to find himself within his life as the son of a well to do farmer in America's heartland. He craves a life full of academics and adventure but allows himself to be forced into a mundane existence to suit his family's needs. The entire first half of this book is extremely tragic. I wanted to scream and beat this dutiful son with a brick as he made bad decision after bad decision, simply because he refused to stand up for himself and make decisions that suited HIM.

A Place to Belong

I've finished the fifth Pulitzer-winning book, One of Ours, by Willa Cather. It's excellent. In college I read two of Cather's other novels, My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, and I don't have fond memories of either one. In fact, I don't really have any memories of either one because I'm not sure I finished reading them. When this challenge is complete I plan to revisit those novels. Sometimes with books, as it can be with people, the timing is just not right.

The hero of One of Ours is a young Nebraskan farmer boy named Claude Wheeler. Claude is intelligent, sensitive and passionate. He's also a little bit sad most of the time. From the time he is a young man he knows he doesn't exactly fit in with the farmer's life that he was born into; yet no matter where he looks for a place to belong he can't seem to find one. First he tries college, but he dislikes the religious school his family has sent him to. He tries to convince his parents to allow him to transfer to the state school, but to no avail. Before he is able to finish college his father impels him to take on managing the family farm so that he can invest in a ranch in Colorado. Claude manages the farm ably, but he gets no joy from it and his restlessness only deepens.

Book #4: Alice Adams

I don't get it. Was this a cautionary tale? Was this supposed to be  tragedy? Who were we supposed to be rooting for in this book? The author doesn't really make it very clear. I'm not even certain whether or not the ending was supposed to be happy or sad. I guess I should explain myself..

A Perilous (Social) Climb

If I could somehow reach into the fictional world of Alice Adams, I'd give her two things: a copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, and a copy of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, published in 1847. Also, I'd slap her mother.

The Age of Innocence, or: Maria Cries Her Eyes Out

I finished reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence while on my lunch break. I sat at the counter of a coney island restaurant in downtown Detroit (quite possibly the least romantic place on the planet to read such a romantic story), and I cried into my plate of uneaten fries, wondering how a novel to which I already knew the ending could evoke such an emotional reaction, and thinking, “Now this – THIS is a prize worthy book.” I’m pretty sure the waitresses thought I was crazy, but because they are sweeties and I eat there often they just brought me some extra napkins and pretended not to notice my blubbering. I left a particularly good tip.