Marilynne Robinson's Gilead - 2005 Pulitzer Winner

Alright, so I know that I'm TERRIBLY behind on my blogging. Pregnancy seems to have turned me into a single minded bump on the couch, much more interested in reading reviews of strollers and cribs than actually reading literature. But you read it here first, my brain (at least the part of it not controlled by these crazy hormones) is staging a comeback! So here goes, I'm finally reviewing my Grand Cayman reading list.

I have to confess that I was REALLY dreading reading Gilead. Take a look at the description from amazon: 

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

Let's be honest, it sounds unbearably boring. Iowa? Preachers from Maine? Don't tell me you're hooked by the description. You'd be lying. Worse, you'd be one of those people that my girlfriend A in Houston and I roll our eyes about when they say their absolute favorite book is ________ (pick the most pretentious, least likable book you can think of, and insert title here). Aren't those people the worst? But I digress.... 

Despite the snooze-fest of a synopsis, the reviews for this book by actual readers on sites like amazon or goodreads were pretty outstanding. I must say, however, I did suspect some of those reviewers came from the aforementioned group of literary snobs.... So, it was with great trepidation that I plunged into this book. 

However, I was again pleasantly surprised. It turns out the Pulitzer Committee may know a thing or two about great fiction (despite what my mother has to say on the matter). True, the subject matter is not as captivating as the latest gripping thriller, but the prose are beautifully written and the narrative voice is unique and so believable. As a soon to be first time parent, I also enjoyed the musings on parent-child relationships and the narrator's attempts to leave a legacy for his young son who he knows he will never truly know.  

John Ames is very much a simple man. He remained in his small hometown in Iowa his entire life and entered into the family vocation (preaching) without giving either much thought at the outset. He does not believe himself to be an outstanding man or even a particularly talented preacher. He is simply a man who knows he will soon die and knows that his little boy will never have the chance to know him. With this knowledge, he attempts to capture a bit of his own family history, nuggets of advice he wants to pass on to his son, and the simple truths of his own life. In this way he hopes that his son will someday get to know him posthumously. It's a simple idea that is beautifully executed. 

There were so many wonderful passages in this novel. I am typically not an underliner, but I found myself marking short passages on my Kindle while reading this book. I guess I was just drawn to John Ames' voice. As he begins his exploration of the father son relationships in his family, he muses:

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.    

See what I mean about the style and the narrative voice? I think this captures so many father and son relationships perfectly. Ultimately, Ames' son will likely know more about his father from the journal his father leaves behind for him than he otherwise would have known had he lived. 

Ultimately, I came away from Gilead with a great admiration for Robinson as a writer, but I'm not running out to buy her other books. I still need a bit more of a story.    

Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons - 1919 Pulitzer Winner

Yesterday while I was finishing The Magnificent Ambersons my husband kept asking me if everything was alright. I guess my heavy sighs tipped him off. The main character, Georgie Amberson Minafer, is so despicable I couldn't help myself. Georgie ranks among the most egomaniacal fictional characters I have ever come across, and his character flaws result in the misery of pretty much every woman in this book. I know that every great novel needn't feature an Atticus Finch, but it certainly helps when you have someone to root for.    

This is the second book in a trilogy, but Tarkington provides enough in the way of background to make jumping in with book two easy. The Ambersons are an ostentateously wealthy family, building what would today be considered a McMansion and indulging in numerous extravagances (my favorite of which is that they purchase, wait for it, a dog). Major Amberson is the patriarch of the family, and his daughter Isabel was, we are told, the belle of every ball. However, after Isabel's preferred suitor (Eugene) makes a drunken blunder while serenading her one evening, she dismisses him for good and marries the boring Wilbur Minafer. They have only one child, Georgie, and Georgie is the Major's sole grandson. Georgie is literally spoiled rotten, and he wreaks havoc everywhere he goes resulting in a unanimous desire by the townspeople that he get what he has coming to him, which he, of course, ultimately does but only after ruining many lives.  

The story begins with Georgie home from college and attending a ball in his honor. He falls for the beautiful and popular young Lucy, and for the life of me I could never figure out why, but she falls for him. He is arrogant, rude, lacking in charm, and determined to do nothing with his life. What girl wouldn't succumb to such a young man? 

It turns out that Lucy is the daughter of Eugene who disappeared from the town 20 years earlier after Isabel rejected him. Eugene is now a widower, and he has returned to town with his only daughter and dreams of designing automobiles. Georgie dislikes Eugene from the start and mocks the invention of the automobile as a fad. Despite Georgie's distaste for him, Eugene and Isabel rekindle their old friendship, and after Wilbur dies it seems that Isabel and Eugene may finally marry. But, oh no! Georgie gets word that his mother is being gossiped about because of the time she is spending with Eugene (over a year after her husband's death), and he sends Eugene away, forbids his mother ever to see him again, and packs both himself and his mother off to Europe in order to save the Amberson name. This is made worse by the fact that Isabel is a supremely likable character who is kind to everyone despite her supreme wealth and wants to make her son happy more than anything else. 

Georgie's actions part him from the young Lucy, and because of that Georgie thinks he's making a real sacrifice. Tarkington tries to make us believe that Georgie is terribly in love with Lucy, but it was hard to imagine that Georgie actually had time to care a lick for Lucy (or anyone else) with all of the time he spent thinking about himself. He finally brings his mother back to America the day before she dies, but he refuses to allow Eugene to see her. She dies saying it would have been nice to have seen him one last time. Pretty awful, right? In the meantime, beautiful Lucy can't get over Georgie, and she never marries.

The Major dies shortly after Isabel, and it turns out the Amberson's are dead broke. At this point, we are supposed to believe that Georgie has changed because he loses his entire fortune and takes a hazard pay job handling nitroglycerin in order to support his aunt Fanny who he has pretty much terrorized for the past 25 years. He gets hit by a car and Lucy and her father come to the hospital, and we are left with the thought that all will be well. Well, you know what, I don't think he deserves it, and poor Lucy definitely deserves more than this brainless, arrogant ass. 

I did think the book was historically interesting, as Tarkington explores ideas of urban sprawl, class, and the changes resulting from the invention and popularization of the automobile. I just couldn't get over Georgie Amberson Minafer, the most unlikeable of heroes.  

Cormac McCarthy's The Road - 2007 Pulitzer Winner

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road on Sunday night. I'll confess that it had been sitting on my bookshelf for years and was one of those purchases that probably had more to do with the "buy 1 get 1 half price sticker" still on the book's front cover rather than any interest I actually had in reading it at the time. I previously read McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and I confess, I was bored to tears. The  only reason I took the book from the shelf last week was to check the title off of my Pulitzer list. I wasn't looking forward to reading about a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, and I was relieved when I opened the book and realized the font was fairly large (i.e. the book wasn't very long). 

Then I started reading, and I have to say, I loved this book. Unlike many other readers, I didn't find McCarthy's lack of punctuation and lack of complete sentences distracting, which is surprising, because I have to confess, I'm a bit of a punctuation nut. I found his sparse prose beautiful and well suited to the subject matter. Based on McCarthy's well known distaste of the semicolon and other punctuation, I'm not sure that I agree with other readers that the punctuation (or lack thereof) in The Road is really meant to underscore the book's themes and to further illustrate the fact that the man and boy are on the precipice of starvation. But I do love the idea that his punctuation isn't a matter of personal style but was, rather, meant to convey something about the story. I'm just not buying it. 

The one thing I can't quite figure out is his lack of use of apostrophes in only those conjunctions involving the word "not," e.g. dont, cant, wouldnt, shouldnt, didnt, and werent. Why does he omit apostrophes from only these conjunctions and leave them in other words? If somebody knows the answer, please comment. I'd love to hear any theories.  

But enough about the punctuation, that's not the main event. This is the story of a father and son who walk along a road in a cold, dark world, heading for the coast. The father dreams only of survival, but the boy longs for the color of the sea, which he has never seen, and other survivors, namely other children. The man and his son are frightened, starving, and plagued by nightmares that come both on the road and in their sleep. In this bleak setting McCarthy explores themes of survival and faith, and he examines the human psyche in the face of such destruction.     

But this is really a love story. The man's love for his son is so deep that it fuels him. His only interest is in protecting his child. Thoughts of suicide and of death are constantly present, but the man keeps moving along the road, fighting for his child's survival despite questions of whether the child wants to survive or whether survival in the face of such horrors should really be his goal. As they fight for survival, the man attempts to bring joy to his son's life, carving him a flute, remembering the boy's toy truck when they are forced to leave many of their possessions behind, and feeding a starving man, even though they too are starving, because it is what the boy wants. He also struggles to teach his child that good does exist, telling his son that they are the good guys, and they carry the fire, even though I don't think the man believes this anymore. We also see how well the man has done in the face of such adversity because the boy truly is a "good guy," always ensuring that his Papa shares their provisions equally and wanting to rescue others that they meet on their journey. Despite growing up in a world so desolate and peopled by evil men who eat other humans, the boy is still amazingly uncorrupted and trusting.

I think this book also appealed to my early interest in pioneer stories involving people who lived off the land and struggled to survive (although in this case, everything is dead, and they are forced to scavenge for old canned goods, which is a bit different than the Laura Ingalls Wilder books of my youth). Despite my early misgivings, I highly recommend The Road to other readers.       

Pulitzer Project

Several months ago I committed to reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction. I was shocked when I printed off the list and realized I had read less than 15! It turns out my recent reading lists have been a little heavy on novels like The Hunger Games and Twilight trilogies and pretty light on anything that could be considered actual literature. I had a long way to go.

I'm now about 25% of the way through the list, and I am really enjoying this project. My husband keeps reminding me that I don't HAVE to read ALL of the books on the list. These comments are met with blank stares from me. Does he really think I would leave 2 or 3 unread? No way! There's definitely a disconnect between us when it comes to things like this. My husband can be totally engrossed in a book, and put it down with 20 pages left and forget about it. I won't go to bed or go to dinner with only 20 pages left in a book, and I would NEVER not read the last 20 pages of a book! I will finish this project, and now I've committed to it in writing.  

These are the ones I've read so far:
2011: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding
2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2008: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1918: His Family by Ernest Poole  

21 down, 64 more to go. So far the prize winner that I really just don't get is Tinkers by Paul Harding. I found it really disjointed, and I couldn't wait to finish the book just to check it off my list. If I had to pick the top 5 so far I think it would be the following (in chronological order): Middlesex, Empire Falls, The Color Purple, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Ask me tomorrow, and you may get a different list.

I would love to know other people's favorite Pulitzer books. For a complete list of the prize winners follow this link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Fiction