Resurrected Review: Spotted Lily, by Anna Tambour

Resurrected Review: Spotted Lily, by Anna Tambour

In honor of her new 2023 story collection, Death Goes to the Dogs, I'm resurrecting a review I did back in 2005 of Anna Tambour's first novel, Spotted Lily. I'll get to Death Goes to the Dogs sometime, mind! (And I'm assured that despite the cover illustration, it is not really a horror collection.) Anna herself is truly one of the most individual voices in our field, and this was clear right from her start.

Anna Tambour's first novel is funny, moving, and true. At the open it seems set to be a satirical account of a somewhat aimless young woman's deal with the devil, and as such it is funny enough. But along the way -- or more probably, from the start, did we but know it -- it becomes an affecting look at an Australian woman's discovery of herself. Oh, and a love story too. With plenty of erotic imagery -- but with most of the actual eroticism suppressed.

Angela Pendergast is a 30ish Australian woman who has moved from her family's ranch in the bush to the big city. She wants to be a Writer, specifically a Bestselling Writer, but she finds it hard to actually get down to writing her Novel. Put simply, she wants to Have Written, not to write. She has a part-time job at a New Age bookstore, and she lives in a house with a few roommates.

Then the Devil shows up. He wants to be the new roomer -- but more than that, he offers her a deal. He'll write her Novel, a guaranteed bestseller. In exchange, of course, for the usual.

So far, so relatively normal. But both Angela and the Devil, whom she names Brett Hartshorn, aren't quite such simple characters. Soon Brett is immersing himself in human literature, trying to decide what makes a bestseller. (Before too long he lights on Barbara Cartland, and who can argue?) Meanwhile Angela is being remade as a glamorous Author, which amounts to accepting her curviness as loveliness, and to abandoning herself to the ministrations of a couple of fashion advisers. Which is a bad description of that portion of the book -- the "advisers" aren't conventionally portrayed at all, and Angela (now called Desirée Lily) is quite a different "Author".

But the book has further twists and turns. It seems what the Devil wants, and for that matter what Angela wants, isn't quite as clearcut as we might have thought. Never is the next plot development what we expect, as Angela learns more and more about things she has ignored, as she indeed becomes a bestselling author, in a very surprising and funny way, and as the Devil, indeed, is delivered his promised soul.

Inevitably one of the things Angela really needs is to return home, to come to an accommodation with the bush she left, with the parents she left. And, finally, she needs to come to one more accommodation -- another striking surprise!

Spotted Lily is quite an impressive debut. Perhaps most of all it is a very funny book, without being what you would call a comedy. It is also a believable and complete portrait of a woman. It is very surprising, and refreshingly so. I thought perhaps the need to always be original led to a bit of a strain for effect right at the close -- I admit I expected a slightly different, more conventional resolution, and I'm not quite sure the final twist really works -- but it's completely honest to the spirit of the book. Anna Tambour, on the strength of Spotted Lily and her earlier story collection, Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &, is one of the most delightful, original, and varied new writers on hand.

Review: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

Review: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

by Rich Horton

This is Cassandra Khaw's first full-length novel (I think -- there have been several novella-length chapbooks.) I have been intrigued by their work for a while, particularly after reading the 2019 story "Mighty are the Meek and the Myriad", which I included in my Best of the Year volume, so I was anticipating this book. Khaw is a Malaysian writer and game designer, and most of their work has a distinct horror slant. That includes this novel -- even though it is pure SF.

This novel is primarily told from the POV of Maya, a profane woman working for (and obsessively in love with) Rita, who seems to be the leader of a group of space-based criminals which has fallen apart after the death of one of them, Johanna, some 40 years before. And now Rita is trying to get the gang back together, for (of course (sigh)) one last mission. The nature of the mission -- and, indeed, the nature of the gang, and of this future, are largely for the novel to reveal. Indeed, from the beginning, the reader is thrown into a world with little in the way of guideposts, little in the way of back story, and has to piece things together as things go on.

Rita and Maya, for the first half or more of the novel, keep trying to convince former members of the gang to rejoin them, mainly to help save Elise, one of their number who had physically died but managed to escape into the "Conversation", where the AIs who seem to dominate this multiple star system polity communicate. Some of their number agree to rejoin -- all reluctant, all for the same reasons -- distrust of Rita, especially over the loss of Johanna. Others turn out to be dead -- really dead. But over time a sort of quorum assembles -- and they head to the mysterious planet Dimmurborgir.

But I've skipped some stuff. For one thing, there is another major character, an AI named Pimento. Pimento is, I think, the most sympathetic character in the novel -- he is subservient to another AI, the Merchant Mind, but he seems to want to gain agency of his own. For another thing, there is Elise, who has her own POV chapters, as she tries to maintain her identity free from the searching AIs. And there are questions about the true natures of Rita and Maya and company -- it seems they are clones, who can be re-instantiated (mostly) after death, and reloaded, as it were, with their preserved consciousness. And clones are second -- or third -- class people in this future. 

All this is super promising, really. But, I fear, it never wholly coheres. To some extent, this is me complaining that I didn't understand this future well enough -- perhaps that's my fault (but I know I'm not alone!) To some extent, this is a Maya problem -- though there are several POV characters, Maya has by far the biggest share of the narrative, and she's kind of, well, boring -- just a constantly swearing fighter, with not much in the way of a third dimension. More Pimento, and more Elise, I think, would be good. In addition, the opening half of the book comes off rather padded -- continuing "shampoo, rinse, repeat" of tracking down another character, convincing her to rejoin the gang, getting rebuffed, guilting her via Elise to overcome her resistance ... even though each of these characters are supposed to be different from each other, this doesn't fully come off. One further weakness is the fuzziness of detail of the -- let's say, geography (or astrography) of this future. How does one get from one system to another? How many systems are there? How many planets? Cities? Moons? It wouldn't take much space to sketch these details in -- and it would really clarify a lot of, well, structure. For this reader, at least.

I will say that the novel's ending is pretty strong -- the final fate of the characters is pretty cool. But I wish it were a bit more earned. The novel needed to be either 30,000 words shorter, and simpler, or 20,000 words longer (or, better, 20,000 words longer with 40,000 new words and 20,000 cut) -- and in so doing, more fully develop the really cool ideas -- the role of AI in this future, and the position of clones, mainly; while tamping down the eventually somewhat repetitious violence, and repetitious voice.

I sound harsh, and I don't mean to be quite so down on the book. I don't think it works, but I did read it, and quickly. It lagged a bit at times, but never enough to make want to stop. The prose is inconsistent, but at its best is excellent -- original, sharp, energetic. And there are ideas behind it that I really liked -- I just don't think they were brought to life enough. In the end, I'll call this a promising first novel, with first novel problems, but which still marks its author as a writer to watch. 

Resurrected Review: The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker

Time to resurrect another old review, this one from my SFF.net newsgroup back in 2003. Kage Baker began publishing SF (and Fantasy) in the late '90s, and made an immediate mark, first with her Company stories (about a time traveling group of people), but eventually with stories in numerous series. She won a Nebula in 2010 for Best Novella ("The Woman of Nell Gwynne's".) Alas, she died of cancer, aged only 57, that same year. The review below is unchanged from what I wrote in 2003.

The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker

Tor, New York, NY, August 2003, 350 pages, Hardcover, US$25.95, ISBN:0-765-30818-5

a review by Rich Horton

Kage Baker is mostly known for her Company series, comprising to date several novels and quite a few short stories, the latter mostly but not exclusively from Asimov's. But she has begun to publish a few non-Company stories. One of these appeared in Asimov's in 2001, a huge novella, almost 36,000 words, called "The Caravan From Troon". She has now expanded the novella into a novel, called The Anvil of the World.

The expansion has been done fairly simply by adding two more novellas, of roughly similar length, to the original one. (A quick check suggests that "The Caravan From Troon" is all but unchanged as the first section of The Anvil of the World.) The novellas are closely linked, featuring the same cast of characters, and following on each other sequentially.

In "The Caravan From Troon", a mysterious man named Smith, who had come to Troon to escape the wrath of the family of someone he had killed (his previous job was assassin), is assigned to lead a caravan from the agricultural city Troon to the seaside town of Salesh. The caravan must pass through the mountains controlled by the Demon called the Master of the Mountain, and also through the territory of the mostly pacifistic Yendri, or "greenies", forest dwelling folk who sometimes erupt in resentment at the technological ways of humans (or as they are called "Children of the Sun"). (It should be noted that Children of the Sun, Yendri, and demons are physiologically similar and each species is interfertile with the others, which turns out to be critical to the plot in a number of ways.) The caravan consists of a number of variously suspicious folks, including the sickly Lord Ermenwyr and his extremely lovely nurse; the highly competent cook Mrs. Smith; a courier named Parradan Smith; another family named Smith (yes, it's kind of a joke, though it later becomes somewhat significant); and a Yendri herbalist, as well as a teenaged girl named Burnbright whose job is "runner" -- to run ahead of the caravan.

This first story simply tells of the caravan's journey to Salesh. To be sure, the journey is not without incident -- the caravan is attacked on a couple of occasions, including once at an inn where Smith himself is nearly killed; most of the passengers prove not to be what they seem; Smith finds himself entrusted with an unexpected additional delivery. By the end we have a better idea of the social and political issues of this world, and we more or less know who all the players really are.

The second segment is a murder mystery of sorts. Smith and his fellow caravan workers, at the end of the first section, found it wise to leave the caravan business and open an inn, under the patronage of Lord Ermenwyr. Mrs. Smith is the cook, Burnbright runs messages for the inn, Smith himself is the innkeeper, and others, such as Keyman Smith, work as busboys, waiters, and the like. During Festival time in Salesh, the entire city gives itself over to a few days of sexual license. Unfortunately for Smith, a guest at the inn is murdered, and he is charged by the investigating constable with finding the murderer -- the constable having other plans involving a certain lovely. A further complication is provided by a wizard who has challenged Lord Ermenwyr to a magic duel. And finally, Burnbright falls in love with yet another guest.

Smith's investigations lead him to make some unexpected discoveries about the past life of certain of his associates. He also finds the murderer -- I thought a nicely set up surprise. And Burnbright's affair goes forward, but not without difficulty, and Lord Ermenwyr has his duel -- quite amusingly portrayed.

In the third section, a real estate company is proposing to build a development at a site sacred to the Yendri. This cause considerable interspecies tensions, and indeed it seems that a race war may be unavoidable. Amidst all this Lord Ermenwyr receives a Sending from his sister, who needs his help. Which turns out to involve a boat -- and Smith is the only person Lord Ermenwyr knows who can sail.

The resolution this time involves secrets about Smith's own past, which I thought were revealed fairly cleverly. It also involves dealing with the relationships between all the races, and considerable exploration of the history and myth underlying this fantasy world.

All in all, this is quite an enjoyable novel. It is fairly witty throughout, and cleverly imagined, if most of the setting consists of ringing changes on familiar fantasy environments. The moral is humanistic and affecting. The structure, as hinted, is a bit episodic -- it really is more three separate but linked stories than one unified novel. It's an entertainment, with just a hint of a serious core to it. Amiable, a bit rambling, not a major work but good fun.

Review: Late Stories, Punch and Powell, by Inez Holden

Review: Late Stories, Punch and Powell, by Inez Holden

by Rich Horton

Here's a curious book by a writer I knew nothing about until a couple of weeks ago. Inez Holden was born in 1903 to Wilfred Holden and Beatrice Paget, both from families that could be considered "landed gentry". That marriage was apparently not a very good one (Inez claimed her first memory was of her father shooting at her mother), and Inez' relationship with her mother was also not very good. (For one thing, her mother did not bother to record her birth in a timely fashion, so that the 1903 birth date is not certain -- she may have been born in 1904.) Apparently her mother spent extravagantly on herself, and nothing on Inez. Inez' first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published in 1929, and her second, Born Old, Died Young, in 1932. She published a number of short stories and another novel in the 1930s. One of her books is a collection of some of those short stories, rewritten in "Basic English", an 800 word vocabulary that was briefly fashionable as a means of spreading English around the world as a sort of common language. 

Holden is best known nowadays for her writing about the home front of World War II. She spent some time working in, or reporting on, wartime factories. A short novel, Night Shift, and a piece of reportage, It Was Different at the Time has been recently reprinted by Handheld Press (a wonderful enterprise!) as Blitz Writing. Handheld have also reprinted There's No Story There, a sort of novel based on three shorter pieces, which appear to be lightly fictionalized accounts of life and work in a wartime factory. Beside these books, and her '30s novels, she published two in the '50s: The Owner, and The Adults. Besides those novels she published a number of short stories in Punch, during the period that Anthony Powell was working there -- these are perhaps more sketches than stories, and they make up the bulk of this book.

Anthony Powell and Inez Holden met in the '20s, when both were, to some degree or another, part of the "Bright Young Things" set. Holden's first two novels went to Duckworth, where Powell worked, and he recommended against publishing them, but he was overruled by Thomas Balston -- and it is suggested that Holden's "personal charms" paid a role. (She was rather a beauty.) But Powell and she remained friends to some degree, and they lunched with Evelyn Waugh at one point. Holden was a friends with Waugh, and H. G. Wells, and Sidney Smith, and George Orwell (in his case, briefly his lover.) Powell used her as the model for Roberta Payne, a significant character in his last pre-War novel, What's Become of Waring (a novel I like a good deal.) While Powell never seems to have much liked her novels, he tended to praise her style, and I think that contributed to his buying her late stories for Punch.

The book at hand is published by the Anthony Powell Society, and edited by Jeff Manley and Robin Bynoe. As such it leans into Holden's connection to Powell. It includes the Punch stories, 17 in all, that appeared between 1953 and 1958. They are short -- between a few hundred and a couple of thousand words. They are dialogue heavy, arch, somewhat absurd, and quite funny. They don't resolve to much in the way of plot, and, really, that's not the point. The characters include Princesses, kleptomaniacs, quacks, failures, Americans ... all kinds of weirdos! They are never less than readable, and mostly immensely amusing, if in the end rather slight. I liked "Love, Breath, and Circumstances", about an American couple thoroughly misinterpreting a book of instructive love letters; and "The Young Table", in which an American schoolgirl in England has to sit at the table for younger girls, a bit of a problem given her interest in older men; and "Myself as Leader", in which the narrator decides to lead a group of hooligans in their criminal enterprises, while staying quite out of things herself; and "The Age of Innocence", about a rackety bunch of old people mistreating each other. But, really, all the stories are worth reading, partly because they never overstay their welcome -- and Holden's narrative voice is a delight.

In addition to the stories, each of the editors, Jeff Manley and Robin Bynoe, contributes an essay, about Holden's life and work, contextualized by her relationship to Powell. There are also reprints of memorial pieces by Powell, and by Holden's cousin Celia Goodman, on the occasion of Holden's death. A few letters between Powell and Goodman, concerning an abortive attempt at collecting some of Holden's short fiction (presumably including these stories from Punch) are reproduced.

This is really quite a worthwhile project, bringing to attention an intriguing selection of work by a minor but unjustly forgotten 20th Century writer. These are just the sort of stories that are wholly of their time, and wholly of their author's voice, and as such perhaps easy to overlook, but in their small way significant. I for one will be looking for her novels -- particularly the science fictional Born Old, Died Young, and the quite odd-looking The Owners.

Review: O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather

Review: O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather

by Rich Horton

Last week right after I finished My Ántonia I sort of by accident read O Pioneers! -- in a single sitting, literally. (Sitting in the emergency room waiting for my wife to get to see a doctor. (In the end, she didn't -- we left. And she's OK. It should have been an urgent care visit anyway.)) So, what the heck, I'll review it too!

O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's second novel, but the first in which she leaned into writing about her childhood landscapes -- and landscapes are key to Cather, though of course so are people. This got her branded, for a while, as "just" a regional writer, but she was so much more than that. And, you know, as a midwesterner myself I have some sensitivity to the whole "the coasts don't think the Midwest matters thing -- "flyover country" or in Cather's time, "take the train through country". Maybe we're oversensitive about that? But, I think not, really. And the way Cather's reputation -- not so much during her lifetime, but pretty much as soon as she died -- became sort of "well, she wrote nicely about Nebraska which nobody ever did, so nice but not important" is kind of an aspect of that. But, happily, in recent decades she's been if not exactly rediscovered at least reevaluated, and has again taken her place as one of the greatest American writers.

Anyway, back to O Pioneers! It's a short novel (about 50,000 words.) It's the first of what is called her "Prairie Trilogy" -- along with The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia. In a way I feel like O Pioneers! and My Ántonia along with A Lost Lady are a better "trilogy", all set in Nebraska towns that very much resemble the Red Cloud of Cather's childhood. (Song of the Lark is set in Colorado (and in non-prairie places like Chicago and Germany!)

O Pioneers! is primarily the story of Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant to Nebraska. We meet her as a teenager. She and her little brother Emil are in town, shopping, and the boy's cat has run up a street lamp. Alexandra fetches her friend Carl Linstrum, who shinnies up the pole and fetches the cat. And then they head home, where Alexandra's father is dying. And we realize that Alexandra, only about 14, must be the head of her family.

The story is told in third person, but Carl Linstrum becomes in a way the person through whom we see Alexandra -- and, also, the other major woman character, Marie Tovesky. So he sort of resembles Jim Burden from My Ántonia, though certainly Jim and Carl are different people, as are Alexandra and Ántonia. And over the years, as Carl goes to university, heads to St. Louis to become an engraver, then to the Klondike gold rush, then back to Nebraska, he encounters Alexandra again and again, sees how she has made a great success of the Bergson farm, though, as she says once, she's often lonely. Alexandra's brothers have a harder time of it, though they benefit from her success -- though Emil, the best of them, perhaps, has special problems. And there is always Marie Tovesky, who fascinates Emil, but who unhappily marries another man ...

There is tragedy aplenty in this novel, and one particularly lurid event. But, too, there is as ever the land, and the people either being conquered by it or conquering. And Alexandra, strong, simple, stolid, unimaginative but intelligent and ambitious, is certainly in that sense a conquerer. Marie is the contrast to her -- very imaginative, loving, not at all simple. The novel ends in a marriage, but it is in no sense a romance. It's effective, and sometimes beautiful -- but it's not the novel My Ántonia is -- in some ways it seems sort of a rehearsal for the later novel. 

I ought to add that the edition I read, a Bantam Classics edition from 1989 (though my copy is a 2008 reprint) has an excellent introduction by Vivian Gornick, which addresses Cather's life and ambitions and achievements, and touches on her prairie novels, especially this one and its immediate successor, The Song of the Lark. Gornick ends by comparing her to a couple of near contemporaries: Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf. She concludes by saying "Today Jean Rhys seems dated, Virginia Woolf important, and Willa Cather wise."

My other reviews of Willa Cather:

My Ántonia 

Death Comes for the Archbishop

A Lost Lady

Review: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

Review: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

by Rich Horton

The other day I reviewed Willa Cather's My Ántonia and mentioned that she and Edith Wharton might be my favorite (classic) American writers. My Ántonia is generally regarded as Cather's best novel -- and so here's a look at what is generally regarded as Wharton's best novel. 

I have discussed Wharton numerous times before:

The House of Mirth

A Backward Glance

Old New York

Major Short Stories: "Roman Fever", "Xingu", "The Eyes", "Autre Temps ..." and "The Long Run", "The Lady's Maid's Bell"

Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862 (11 years before Cather) to a wealthy New York family. She was raised much in the manner of wealthy young women of her time, plenty of travel, a private education (tutors and governesses), and the expectation of an appropriate marriage. She rebelled to an extent, writing from an early age (she tried a novel at 11, completed a novella when 15, and published a translation of a poem anonymously at 15). She married an older man, Edward ("Teddy") Wharton, when she was 23. The marriage foundered, largely, it appears, because of Teddy's mental illness. They divorced in 1913, but Edith had begun an affair with Morton Fullerton several years earlier. She lived primarily in France from about 1908, and she died in 1937.

Wharton published a few short stories and poems in the '80s and '90s. Aside from a privately printed collection of poems, her first book was non-fiction: The Decoration of Houses, in 1897, which is indeed about interior decoration. Her first book length fiction was a novella, The Touchstone, in 1900. Another novella and a full-length novel appeared before The House of Mirth in 2005, which was her first major success. Her other major novels are The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920). She also wrote a great deal of short fiction, including a lot of ghost stories, and a lot of novellas. Her best work at that length is probably those in the collection Old New York; plus the high school assigned reading warhorse, Ethan Frome. At shorter lengths my favorites are "Autre Temps" and "Roman Fever", but there are a lot more -- she was a magnificent writer of short stories. Many of her stories are ghost stories.

The Age of Innocence is set primarily in New York in the 1870s -- in fact, I think it can be precisely dated to 1875. This was, I understand, a purposeful change of pace for Wharton, as most of her fiction was set in contemporary (to her) times, though that is somewhat lost on present-day readers, for whom New York in around the turn of the 20th Century (as with The House of Mirth) is indistinguishable from New York in 1875. But the difference mattered a great deal to Wharton, and it is crucial to this novel.

The hero is Newland Archer, a man of about 30, a somewhat dilettantish lawyer, of a very good and very wealthy family. As the novel opens, he has just become engaged to May Welland, a very eligible young woman (of about 22), from a similarly prominent family. He is very happy. He has not long before finished an affair with a married woman, and is sure that he is now mature and experienced enough to settle down, and he loves May. At the opera that evening, as he is wondering when their engagement will be publicly announced, he notices a woman in the Welland box. This is the Countess Ellen Olenska, a cousin of May's, who has just returned from Europe, having left her abusive husband (a Polish count.) Ellen is about Newland's age, and he had known her well when they were younger. She had a slightly unfairly rackety reputation even then, due to her mother's scandalous life; and as a result she and her mother had moved to Europe, where she had married. It is only the social standing of May's grandmother, the redoubtable Mrs. Manson Mingott (who appears in other Wharton stories) that allows Ellen to appear in public. The intricate social politics of the situation lead Newland and May to allow their engagement to become public earlier than planned, and soon Newland is somewhat intimately involved in other actions aimed to repairing the Countess' social standing.

The next part of the novel concerns an intricate web of parties, other social events, and maneuvering. Newland presses May to convince her parents to move up the wedding -- at first the engagement was to last 18 months or so. The Countess is introduced in various places, but also takes some steps of her own, which include being seen with a notorious and not much trusted married banker (who is, gasp, an Englishman among other crimes.) She is also pursuing a divorce, which her family and the rest of New York society consider a step too far -- living separated from her husband is fine, and conducting discreet affairs is OK, but divorce? No. And Newland is deputized by his law firm to advise her that a divorce would be unwise. This is a problem for him, partly because he has fallen for her, and, it seems, she for him; but he does his duty, and she acquiesces.

Newland Archer is presented as a slightly unconventional young man in his milieu. He is interested in art and literature (Middlemarch is namechecked as a book he has ordered.) He is -- he would maintain -- less bound by his society's conventions. And as events proceed, he contemplates throwing over May and running off with Ellen -- but she is unwilling to do so many people so much hurt. And so the marriage proceeds, and the honeymoon follows ... and a year later there is another crisis, and another decision.

I think most people know how that ends -- how it must -- and then follows the famous and moving last chapter, set decades later, after May had died, and Newland, along with his son and daughter-in-law, visit Paris, where Madame Olenska retires. Wharton manages this beautifully, and it is an achingly sad but inevitable bit of closure ...

I've brushed over a lot of incident, and a lot of nuance above. (And quite a few comic touches.) This truly is a lovely novel. And it continues to raise questions in me. Newland's character is one thing -- he is by no means as unconventional a man as he'd like to think. And May is by no means the innocent and ignorant woman he thinks. Early on we see him thinking about how he will educated her -- almost as a sort of surrogate father, he wishes to introduce her to his passions. But in many ways she remains a step ahead of him -- she is never as innocent or ignorant as he thought, but she is wholly and dutifully a woman of her class, and she knows she does not want to do what Newland wants -- she doesn't want to read the poetry he likes, she doesn't want to travel, she wants him to be the husband she expected. And she gets all that. And, of course, she knew all about his near affair with Madame Olenska.

This was famously made into a well-regarded movie in 1993, directed by Martin Scorcese, and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland, Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess, and Winona Ryder as May. I saw the movie back then and quite enjoyed it. I need to see it again, and see what I think now. 

Review: My Ántonia , by Willa Cather

Review: My Ántonia , by Willa Cather

by Rich Horton

When I was younger -- even just 20 years younger -- I don't think I'd ever have thought that my two favorite American writers might end up being Edith Wharton and Willa Cather -- two near contemporaries (Wharton about a decade older) and two otherwise very different women, and very different writers, to each other. As that time I had a completely false view of Willa Cather's fiction, assuming it was dour, dreary, and message bound; and I had read nothing by Wharton save Ethan Frome, which is a novella I like but which is not characteristic of her work. My eventual entrée to Cather was also a novella: A Lost Lady (which is actually somewhat characteristic of much of her work.) I loved A Lost Lady (much as I also loved Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I read at about the same time) and I've since acquired many of her books. But I hadn't had time to get to her masterful "Prairie Trilogy": O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. (I consider A Lost Lady a sort of pendant to those books.) But the time has finally come!

My copy of My Ántonia is a Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, a trade paperback, probably from the '70s. It's signed inside by (I suppose) the first owner, one Susan Caine. The illustrations, by W. T. Benda, are included. (Apparently, in the first edition, Cather had to fight to get them added as loose inserts.) I also listened to parts of the books in audio form, narrated by Andrea Giordani. And finally, I should credit a truly wonderful website, the Willa Cather Archive, maintained by the University of Nebraska, which has the text of her books (sometimes multiple editions) along with critical commentary, textual discussion, illustrations, etc. 

Willa Cather was born in 1873 in Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883. Cather published pieces in the Red Cloud, NE, newspaper early, but planned to become a doctor. But at the University of Nebraska she continued to write, and switched to an English major, graduating in 1894. She moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, and taught school while also working for magazines and newspapers, and publishing occasional stories. She moved to New York to join the editorial staff at McClure's in 1906. (I encountered some editorial correspondence between Cather and a McClure's contributor, H. G. Dwight, when I was writing about Dwight's collection Stamboul Nights.) McClure's serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912, and the "prairie novels" soon followed. She won a Pulitzer in 1923 for her World War I novel One of Ours.  (Wharton, in 1921, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer for Best Novel, and Cather was the second.)

Cather lived in New York from 1906 (summering in New Brunswick eventually), and from 1908 she lived with Edith Lewis. Her only other close relationships were with women, and so it is (plausibly) assumed by many that she was a Lesbian, but she never so identified (publicly.) Of course that last is easy to understand given societal pressures. 

My Ántonia is introduced in (we presume) Cather's voice, as she recounts a meeting with an old friend from her Nebraska childhood, Jim Burden. Jim is now a successful New York lawyer, but they discuss their childhood, and especially the remarkable woman they knew, Ántonia Shimerda; and Jim proposes a dual memoir of her. A few months later, he dumps the manuscript on Cather's desk, and she confesses that she hadn't had time to write her half -- so the rest of the book is Jim Burden's story of his relationship with Ántonia.

(And already I have to make a comment -- that introduction is from the first edition, and from the audiobook version I listened to. I also have a print version, and the introduction is quite different there -- it's somewhat shorter, it lessens some critical (and rather snarky) comments about Jim Burden's wife, and it is not written so as to imply that the narrator of the introduction is Cather herself (for example, it removes a line that identified the narrator as a young girl when they knew Ántonia.) The critical consensus seems to be that the changes -- which occurred in the 1926 reissue -- are an improvement; and I can see the point, but I have to say I was intrigued by the paragraph or so about "Mrs. James Burden", and I didn't mind the identification of the narrator of the introduction as probably Cather.)

The novel (that is to say, Jim Burden's story) has five sections: "The Shimerdas", "The Hired Girls", "Lena Lingard", "The Pioneer Woman's Story", and "Cuzak's Boys". The first tells of Jim's few years on his grandparents' farm, of other local farmers and hands, in particular the Shimerdas, Bohemian immigrants who arrived with their daughter Ántonia (or Tony), who is 14 to Jim's 10, but who becomes his close friend (in part because at first she is the only Shimerda with any English.) The second is set after Jim and his grandparents move into town, followed soon by Ántonia and a number of other girls (most or all also immigrants) who work in town to make money for their families. The third follows some of the career of one of those girls, Lena Lingard, who moves to Lincoln around the same time Jim goes there to university. The fourth concerns Ántonia, and her disastrous "marriage" to a train man everyone but she knew was a cad, and her subsequent return, pregnant, to her family farm. And the final part is set around the time of Jim's meeting recounted in the introduction, when he had, for the first time in many years, visited Black Hawk and caught up with Ántonia, now truly married and the mother of a large family.

The story is centrally about Jim Burden and Ántonia, but there is a horde of further characters. The Shimerdas: Mr. Shimerda -- a skilled weaver and musician but a terrible farmer -- who has a hard time adapting. His elder son, Ambrosch, is surly, not terribly intelligent, but strong. The other son, Marek, is mentally disabled. The cranky and suspicious mother and her youngest daughter, Yulka. The Shimerdas' crooked countryman, Peter Kraijek, who lured them to Nebraska. Two Russian men, Pavel and Peter, who are trying to establish their farm near the Burdens. The Burdens' two farmhands, Otto Fuchs and Jake Marpole, who serve as sort of archetypes of the kind of lonely men who headed West to try to make a life, without the resources to really thrive, despite some real skills. All the "hired girls": Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, the "Bohemian Marys". The Harlings, who employ Ántonia when she moves to town: the father a successful businessman, his much admired son, who will go in the Navy, his impressive elder daughter, Frances, who becomes his business partner, Mrs. Harling, indulgent but rigid in some ways. Ántonia'a other employer, Wick Cutter, the crooked moneylender, and his wife, who hates him. Gaston Cleric, the professor at the university who becomes a mentor to Jim, and who is obviously coded as gay. (Jim's sexuality is less clear -- he marries, but there are no children and perhaps the couple are not close, his only other extended relationship with a woman is with Lena, and seems mostly or entirely platonic, he clearly adores Ántonia but there never seems a question that they'd be romantically involved (though at least to begin with that's explained by their age difference.)) The Widow Steavens, who buys the Burdens' farmhouse and is there to help Ántonia through her first pregnancy. Ántonia's eventual husband, Anton Cuzak, and their huge family, especially Ántonia's favorite, Leo.

There is little conventional plot but much in the way of incident. The Shimerdas' early struggles. Jim and Tony's encounter with a huge rattlesnake in a prairie dog colony. The horrifying story of the reason Pavel and Peter had to leave Russia. Controversy over the cow the Burdens sell the Shimerdas, and Ambrosch's careless ways with harnesses they lend him. Mr. Shimerda's suicide, and Otto making his coffin. Lena being attacked by Crazy Mary, who is convinced Lena is corrupting her husband. The sudden fashion for dancing in Black Hawk, when a couple of dancing instructors come to town. The story Ántonia tells of a tramp who convinces the men operating the threshing machine at harvest to let him help, then purposely falls into the machinery to commit suicide. The blind black piano player who comes to perform at the hotel in town. Ántonia nearly being raped. Ántonia running off to Denver on the promise of marriage to the slimy Larry Donovan, who soon deserts her. Her return, to go back to work on the farm and have her baby. Tiny Soderball's adventures -- running an inn in Seattle, then heading to Alaska for the Klondike Gold Rush, and returning, a wealthy woman, to live in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, with Lena nearby to keep her dressed even as Tiny makes sure Lena takes care of her own money. And finally Jim's visit to Ántonia -- which provides real closure.

So much to admire here -- so much to love. The characters are all completely real (and, to be sure, many were based to some extent or another on people Cather knew as a child ... with Jim Burden, arguably, being based somewhat on herself.) Ántonia is a wonderful character, though neither a saint nor a prodigy. (Unlike Alexandra Bergson, from O Pioneers!, who though flawed in many ways is truly a farming prodigy.) The novel is profoundly feminist, it seems to me -- so many of the major and minor women characters are powerful women making their own way: Ántonia of course, and Frances Harling, and Tiny Soderball, Lena Lingard, Mrs. Gardener (the innkeeper in town.) The book is also a story of immigrants -- who face problems including language, finance, homesickness, prejudice; and who sometimes surive heroically and sometimes fail. It's tremendously moving at times. And it's beautifully written. 

A few short passages:

At Mr. Shimerda's funeral: "Years later, when the open grazing days were over, and the red grass had been plowed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie, when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines; Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross."

Ántonia and Jim watching a sunset: "All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death — heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

"How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass."

The prairie under snow: "The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the whole world was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks. The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft between snow-drifts -- very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same time delighted one. My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind."

Jim at the end, following the track of the first road he and Ántonia took to their farms, as children: "On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared -- were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.

"This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

Truly, Cather has no equal in depicting the great landscapes of the prairies. My Ántonia is a masterwork, one of the great American novels, on one of the most central American themes.