What I Read in July 2012

This month I was involved with two long and complex books — The Folks and Tess of the D’Urbervilles — with alternate, multiple postings. Thanks for your patience.

Ruth Suckow, The Folks. This 1934 novel tells the lives of an Iowa couple, the Fergusons, and their extended family, beginning before World War I and ending during the Great Depression. I have commented by sections:

Ruth Suckow, The Folks (Parts 1 and 2)
Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Continued (Parts 3 and 4)
Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Concluded (Parts 5 and 6)

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Sarah (A Rat in the Book Pile) and I have been reading this classic together and commenting jointly.
I – The Maiden and Maiden No More
II – The Rally and The Consequence
III – The Woman Pays and The Convert
IV – Fulfillment

Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. I learned about globalization in Paris z dozen years ago. I penetrated into a real French department store (no English spoken here) and went looking for t-shirts. I didn’t know what they are called in French, of course, but I quickly learned they are called t-shirts. In this fascinating book, an economist follows her t-shirt on its travels, beginning in the cotton fields of Texas and ending in the second-hand market of Dar Es Salaam.

Michael Lewis, Moneyball. I avoid professional sports and I avoid talking about professional sports, so who would predict I would enjoy this book about how to manage a professional baseball team when you don’t have a lot of money to spend on star players? It’s a great little morality tale about conventional wisdom in any area of life.

I have posted on the two books together: Not Dismal at All.

Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March. Three generations of the Trotta family serve and are served by the long-lived Hapsburg Franz Joseph, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither Franz Joseph nor the Trottas survive the Great War.

Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool. This book contains three novellas by the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. Each story is told in first person and is unsettling in some way. I found the narratives hard to understand and the emotions difficult to relate to. The author’s detached tone worked for me in The Housekeeper and the Professor, but leaves these stories outside my circle of enjoyment.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Conservative. New York Times columnist and Novel laureate (economics) describes the ups and downs of liberal programs in modern America and suggests areas for improvement. The book, published in 2007, does not include the collapse of the housing bubble, the ensuing financial crisis or the election of Obama.

Geraldine Brooks, March. Pulitzer-Prize winning novel imagines the story of Mr. March, the father of the four girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In that book, March is with the troops, but we do not hear what he is doing there. In this book, we find that his life is greatly changed by his wartime experiences.

Josephine Johnson, Now In November. This 1930s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel brings us hard times on the farm. A family struggles to extract enough from the natural world to deal with the outside world of hard time economics and the cruel circumstances of a drought.

Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Concluded

Part V of Ruth Suckow’s Iowa-based novel, The Folks, is entitled The Youngest. The youngest of the four Ferguson children is Bunny, who had appeared without much explanation between Part I (three children) and Part II (four children). He is the unexpected addition, the one Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson could just relax and enjoy. Other children might complain,

But Bunny was always happy. When his mother thought of her youngest, a smile of fond contentment curved her lips. She could truly say that he was the one of their children who had “never caused them a moment’s trouble.” Coming late, he had seemed just to fit in quietly, with a mixture of affectionate youthfulness and queer, understanding maturity.

As my mother-in-law used to day, don’t praise the day before it’s over. The troubles with Bunny when they come are multiple: he marries without telling the folks, he chooses an undesirable bride, he is radicalized by her. The interest in the story is not in Bunny’s actions which, even in the context of the story and the times, are not completely believable. The impact comes from his parents gradual accommodation to his choices.

The final section, The Folks, presents Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson’s further accommodation to the times. He leaves his position at the bank.

There was a new order of business to which he didn’t belong…. He was the old style of banker, he could now admit that freely to himself. An account to him was a trust rather than an opportunity.

What did moderately prosperous Iowans do when they retired in the 1930′s? Move to California, of course. So they try it. Daughter Dorothy (the pretty one) is there, as is Mrs. Ferguson’s wealthy sister. The road trip reminded me, ironically, of The Grapes of Wrath. Unlike Steinbeck’s struggling farmers, the Fergusons travel in comfort but, like them, do not know what they will find. Along with their own experiences, they have a sense of the struggle of others. For migrant workers, of course, it is the struggle against terrible deprivation, of concern with the next meal. For the Fergusons, it is learning that the daughter they had thought so secure is not, that banks at home are failing, and old friends are dying. This leads Mr. Ferguson to question what he has always known.

He was aware of a sense of change pervading everything, although it wasn’t a thing he could touch or locate. He couldn’t say how or when it had happened, but the old, simple surety seemed to be gone — the old bright, simple faith in the way things had started and were likely to continue. The church of his fathers was empty. Even his town, in which he had placed his trust, never doubting that it must follow a steady growth to a fine destiny, seemed instead to have come to a standstill.

The Folks is an account of three generations of a family who live in a particular place at a particular time. The strength of the book comes from the realism of this setting and the customs and attitudes it supports. The individual characterizations are somewhat weaker, although Annie Ferguson is a woman I can understand. As the children grow up and begin separate lives, she waits for her own to belong to her again. It never quite does, and she comes to know it is not possible, just as Mr. Ferguson now understands that the certainties of the past are not going to return either.

Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Continued

I posted my first reactions to this 1934 book a few days ago. At that time I had read Parts One and Two. Part One, The Old Folks, introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson and their extended family, living in a small town in rural Iowa. Part Two, The Good Son, tells the story of the oldest Ferguson child, Carl. One generation from the farm, he plans and lives his life in accordance with established values, not always to his entire satisfaction.

The Fergusons also have two daughters. In Part Three, The Loveliest Time of the Year, we accompany Dorothy in the last days before her wedding and the wedding day itself. Dorothy is the pretty daughter, the compliant one, and she marries well. Yet, when she returns home for the wedding she does not return to what she was before. She finds the family church less attractive than she remembered it.

Yet there was a worn, homely dignity in the shabbiness of the little church. It had been built by true believers. Believers, at any rate, in the sanctity of their own denomination. Dorothy knew now that, although she had felt herself shocked and hurt sometimes by Jesse’s teasing, she had long ago grown out of the folks’ belief and could never go back to it. Maybe it was better that she was going away.

What Dorothy does not question is the importance of marriage and of having found her true love. She is ready to be awakened, but Jesse protects her from expressing it prematurely. The night before the wedding they walk in the yard and kiss, with increasing passion.

A helpless, long, ecstatic sigh, almost a sob, breathed from Dorothy’s lips as Jesse’s pressed harder and harder against them.

“Dorothy — sweetheart –” she heard Jesse whisper — “you’d better not stay out here any longer.”

She said in wonder, “No, I guess not.”

She drew herself away from Jesse. Something in her obedience to him did it for her. She had no power of her own.

Dorothy is liberated enough to own up to her sexual feelings, but the author puts Jesse firmly in charge of their expression and Dorothy accepts that it must be so.

In Part Four, The Other Girl, that girl is Margaret, the other Ferguson daughter. She regards marriage as a trap and her hometown as a place to escape from. She does escape, to New York and Greenwich Village and little tea shops and black candles and the rest of it. With her she carries a romantic image of some great love affair she hopes to experience. She expects to love and to renounce, to suffer and to write sonnets. Margaret is so insufferable as a person that it is difficult to understand how we should see this. If the home town was stifling, New York verges on disgusting with its crumby apartments and failed philosophers. Ultimately Margaret — now calling herself Margot — does find love but then finds that she wants attachment after all. Her married lover tells her how it is.

“Margot,” he told her, “you’ve got to see it a little from my side. I don’t think you realize how little you go outside your own feelings. You hold up love as if it were something apart from people. That’s all right for you. You can do as you please. You haven’t anyone else to think of. It can’t be just the same for me. You’ve never been willing to look at my situation. Or what it meant to me.

Now that we’ve reached this moment of truth, we could stop the music and go on to something else, but Suckow tells us more about Margot’s search for love and self expression. This is an ambivalent book. Suckow realizes that the times they are a changing and that the generation which grew up off the farm is changing with those times. Margaret’s personal limitations weight the story against the benefits of change. Whether bound by convention or fighting against it, in the end, both Dorothy and Margaret want to absorb themselves in the love of a strong man.

For the conclusion of The Folks, click here.

Ruth Suckow, The Folks

Two bloggers sent me here. First, Frisbee: A Book Journal showed me this evocative picture of Ruth Suckow’s house in Hawarden, Iowa.

An ordinary house, right? I grew up in southwestern Ohio, and I have seen this house many times. It is not a slum; these are not poor folks. These are people who don’t have a great deal but believe they are doing right and also doing all right. Frisbee’s reference to Bess Streeter Aldrich also got my attention, and so I found myself a copy of The Folks.

The other blogger, Following Pulitzer, has impressed me with his fair-minded reviews of the Pulitzer-prize winning fiction he is reading in chronological order. Each final post has a “Historical Insight” section, in which Following Pulitzer assesses what understanding the book gives us of the times — the author’s times, as well as the time in the novel (if different). He is reading these books looking for literary merit but also for a snapshot of what the Pulitzer Committee considered outstanding fiction at that time. (Ruth Suckow never won a Pulitzer, but she could have.) Why am I reading this 700+ page novel which is very much a period piece? I respect what Suckow is doing and the people she describes. Following Pulitzer has inspired me to look for historical insights into Midwestern America as it appeared to a perceptive writer in 1934. I break my comments into several posts.

The Folks is about an extended family in Iowa, apparently from about 1910 until the time of publication of the book, 1934. That is apparently, because the setting of the first section entitled “The Old Folks” is never clearly identified as to State or year. We are in a small town somewhere in the Midwest between Ohio and Nebraska. It is a time when horses are still in use and a relatively prosperous, but not wealthy, man is contemplating buying an automobile. World War I has not happened yet. I think Suckow has a comfortable assumption that the reader knows where we are and when we are without spelling it out.

Other things are not exactly spelled out either, but I can infer them because I grew up only one generation removed from the farm. The farm is where we came from and that is where value still resides. Mr. Ferguson does not want his wife to buy eggs because his brother-in-law will bring in eggs from the farm. This delay seriously inconveniences Mrs. Ferguson who cannot openly protest. She knows how important frugality is to her husband; she knows the eggs from the farm are superior; she quietly wishes she did not have to acknowledge these facts. At my grandparents’ farm, in the summer, I avoided eating my grandmother’s butter which was too strong-tasting for me. I didn’t ask for store-bought butter because it was unthinkable. Everyone knew my grandmother’s butter was superior to anything we could buy.

The generation that has left the farm for a more comfortable — and less strenuous — life teaching school or working in a bank continues with the same values of family and church: the less change the better. Frugality and “putting by” for the future are more important that present comfort. Lillian’s mother’s table is bare; she keeps her few embroidered doilies in a drawer because her father-in-law openly disapproves of any display.

Lillian’s husband, Carl Ferguson, grew up in town but with many links to the farm. He is the central character in the second section of the book, set after World War I: “The Good Son.” Carl’s  life defines what it means to be a good son. He does well in school, leads the football team, is active in a young peoples group at the church, attends the local denominational college, marries the right local girl, and advances in a teaching career. To even flirt with another woman offends his sense of himself as a good person:

So anxious to do right! Oughtn’t something to be credited to him for that? — or did it simply make him out a fool? He richly pitied himself again. And he remembered  how, when he was a very tiny child, he used to follow the folks about, pleading anxiously, “Carl good boy! Carl good boy!” But now Life was what he wanted — all that he had put aside in his pliant ignorance.

So we can see trouble ahead, but it does not end as today’s reader would expect. I think the author’s resolution is true to Carl’s character as we have come to know it and to his sense of his place in a particular community at at particular time.

For comments on the next parts of The Folks, click here.