Hoosier author Booth Tarkington must be one of the best of a pack of forgotten writers. Tarkington was awarded one of his two Pulitzers for his 1921 novel Alice Adams. She is a very sympathetic heroine and I put her right up there with Jane Austen's Lizzy.
Many great novels start memorably:
The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his protests added something to his hatred of her.
The novel concerns the life of a family in Indianapolis with a brother and sister who are in their early twenties.
The brother, a thin and sallow boy of twenty, greeted her [his sister Alice] without much approval as she took her place.
"Nothing seems to trouble you!" he said.
"No; nothing much," she made airy response. "What's troubling yourself, Walter?"
"Don't let that worry you!" he returned, seeming to consider this to be repartee of an effective sort; for he furnished a short laugh to go with it, and turned to his coffee with the manner of one who has satisfactorily closed an episode.
"Walter always seems to have so many secrets!" Alice said, studying him shrewdly, but with a friendly enough amusement in her scrutiny. "Everything he does or says seems to be acted for the benefit of some mysterious audience inside himself, and he always gets its applause. Take what he said just now: he seems to think it means something, but if it does, why, that's just another secret between him and the secret audience inside of him! We don't really know anything about Walter at all, do we, mama?"
Walter laughed again, in a manner that sustained her theory well enough; then after finishing his coffee, he took from his pocket a flattened packet in glazed blue paper; extracted with stained fingers a bent and wrinkled little cigarette, lighted it, hitched up his belted trousers with the air of a person who turns from trifles to things better worth his attention, and left the room.
Alice laughed as the door closed. "He's ALL secrets," she said. "Don't you think you really ought to know more about him, mama?"
Great novels also are timeless and if this behavior between siblings in front of a parent does not sound familiar, you have had a very isolated life.
Let’s hope that the Kindle will give new life to Tarkington and other great writers who do not deserve to be forgotten. It is our loss if we neglect to read works like "Alice Adams."
Comments