This is yet another novel I had never heard of until it arrived in a set of Virago Modern Classics. It's the one I was in the middle of when I was sidetracked by Barbara Pym. It is not a long book, but my goodness it is a powerful one.
Here we are back in America, just a few years after the publication of Passing, which I wrote about a few days ago -- this one was published in 1934, and won the Pulitzer Prize for its 24-year-old author. It tells the story of a middle-class family -- mother and father and three daughters -- who are forced into poverty by the Depression. Their only option is to attempt to live by farming the family property, now heavily mortgaged. The novel -- narrated by Marget, the middle daughter -- begins by describing the family's first attempts to adjust to this new way of life. Despite the hardships and the anxieties, there is a certain amount of joy to be derived from the harsh, sparsely populated countryside in which they find themselves:
Kerrin complained of the raw coldness and the house was hard to keep warm enough, but I remember one day of God that came towards the last, when we lay down carefully on the grass so as not to smash the bluets, and smelled their spring-thin scent. The hills were a pale and smoky green that day, and all colors ran into and melted with each other, the red of crab branches dissolving down into lavender of shadows, but the apples had bark of bloody red and gold.
At first, despite the mortgage hanging unrelentingly over them, they manage to survive. But as the girls grow older, problems start to arise within the family. Kerrin, the oldest daughter, who has always been difficult and strange, becomes increasingly mentally and emotionally erratic, though the rest of the family depend on her income as a school teacher to keep them marginally solvent. Her mental state worsens when a young man, the compassionate, intelligent Grant, comes to work on the farm. Both Kerrin and Marget fall in love with him, while he falls in love with the youngest daughter, steady, cheerful Merle, who likes him as a friend but no more. Marget, quiet, plain and inward, stifles her feelings and gets on with her life despite the pain she is suffering, but Kerrin suffers more desperately and openly: 'She made me think of the carrion vines that move with a hungry aimlessness, groping blindly in all directions till they find a stalk to wrap on' says Marget. Finally she is tipped over the edge by her anger and frustration. All this final part of the novel takes place during a fearful drought, which kills all the crops and plunges the family into deep financial trouble. Everything ends tragically.
This all sounds terribly depressing! and in a sense it is. But the quality of the writing is superb -- the novel has been said to be a sort of Wuthering Heights as written by Emily Dickinson, which sounds a bit weird but I can see why. The prose is as close to poetry as prose ever gets, without ever feeling pretentious, and the wildness and strangeness is certainly Bronte-esque, if you'll excuse such a clunky term. But the novel also addresses questions about women's roles, about social change, about race, and of course, through the adolescent narrator, about growing up, with all its pains and confusion: We were the green peas, hard and swollen, she says of herself and her younger sister. There is so much in this novel -- if you have never read it, please do.
