Time limit: This was a project that lasted all year, with the intention of reading one book that counted as an “American classic” per calendar month. I didn’t pre-select the list, although I had a few ideas about what I wanted to include—some of which changed, some of which didn’t.

How did I do?: I did it! The complete list of books I read for this project is below (all links to my reviews):

• A Childhood: an Autobiography of a Place, by Harry Crews (1978)—January
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)—February
• The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (1920)—March
• Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)—April
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (1861)—May
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1885)—June
• Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (1922)—July
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (1966)—August
• The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)—September
• The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851)—October
• The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826)—November
• Sapphira and the Slave Girl, by Willa Cather (1940)—December

Some statistical break-down here:

• 5 out of 12 authors on this list are women (Welty, Wharton, Jacobs, Jewett, Cather)
• 2 out of 12 authors on this list are Black (Wright and Jacobs); 0 are Latinx, Asian-American or Indigenous American. If I’d read into the late 20th and early 21st century this might have been different but it’s still not good—there are plenty of authors I could have read, like Charles W. Chesnutt, James Welch, Zitkála-Šá, Carlos Bulosan, H. T. Tsiang, and Eileen Chang
• 3 out of 12 authors on this list are now acknowledged to have been LGBTQ+ (Capote was gay, Jewett and Cather almost certainly lesbians)
• 7 out of 12 books on this list were published in the 20th century; the remaining 5 were all published in the 19th century
• 3 out of 12 books on this list are works of nonfiction, either memoir or journalism; the remaining 9 are all fiction, either short stories or novels (or a novella in vignettes, in Jewett’s case)
• 5 of these books are set in the South or Deep South (Crews, Welty, Jacobs, Twain, Cather); 4 are set in New England (Wharton, Jewett, Hawthorne, Cooper); 3 are set in the Midwest (Wright, Lewis, Capote). None are set primarily in the Western states or on the West Coast.

Any favourites?: I absolutely adored Harry Crews’s A Childhood; it was a terrific, vivid, evocative, gorgeously written book to open the project. Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs was also a real stand-out for its truthfulness to life, and the curiosity and respect shown to its subjects, the inhabitants of a remote Maine fishing village. Both earned spots on my Best Books of 2023 list against tough competition.

Any disappointments?: I hated The House of the Seven Gables. Other than that, I didn’t deeply dislike any of these, although Native Son was rather hard going. It’s certainly important, but it’s not much fun to read a book that long about a character so fundamentally angry and fucked-up.

Any surprises?: The Last of the Mohicans surprised me a good deal. That tension between racism and wanting to write a good story creates several fascinating characters who we’re not really meant to care about as much as we do, something Cooper achieves almost unwillingly.

Resolutions and discoveries: Discoveries first. It is capital-I Impossible to write anything approaching Great American Novel status without engaging with racism. Eight of these novels do so explicitly. (I include Babbitt, which doesn’t have any Black characters but which does pay glancing attention to anti-Semitism. And, let’s be honest, George Babbitt is exactly the kind of man who joined the Klan in the midwest in the 1920s: a married, white, Protestant small business owner with a deep revulsion for nonconformity who just wants to be popular with the guys.) Those that do not—Wharton, Capote, Jewett and Hawthorne—often engage with it metaphorically or subtextually, as in The House of the Seven Gables‘s themes of generational fraud and disinheritance. Landscape, and the connection to land, were also recurrent touchstones: Harry Crews, Eudora Welty, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne Jewett (plus Cooper and Cather, to an extent) are the most obviously land-tethered. Crews’s memoir, in particular, derives its power from its origin in such a precise place: not just the South, but Georgia; not just Georgia, but Bacon County.

As for resolutions, no more Hawthorne, at least not for a long time. Probably no more Wright. Yes more Crews (I said I’d seek out the rest of his reprints at the start of the year, and I haven’t yet; shame on me). I’ve now read all of Cather’s major works and am into her lesser-known novels, which is handy for reasons I’ll explain shortly. This list should also have contained more authors of colour—it’s partly a problem with the canon, partly a problem with my own framing of the project. Of those authors I could have read and didn’t, Charles W. Chesnutt in particular has really captured my attention and interest; several of his novels are available free through Project Gutenberg, so I might try him in the New Year.

Next?: After an arduous democratic process played out in the comments section of an earlier post, I have tallied votes and consulted my own wishes, and concluded that next year’s reading project is….

This will mean finding lesser-known books by authors whose major works I’ve already read, and I absolutely can’t wait. I’ve already started drawing up a list of ideas, although, like American Classics, B-Sides won’t consist of a pre-determined TBR, and will be subject to my own whims and needs every month. Wish me luck!

Sapphira and the Slave Girl, by Willa Cather (1940).

I’ve been putting off writing about this, for some reason. It’s not at all like most of Cather’s other work: not set in the US West, not much landscape description, considerably shorter (from what I can tell, given that my editions of her other works are from a different publisher), and a novel set in a further historical period than even her other historical novels, like Death Comes For the Archbishop. It was the last novel she wrote before she died, and has distinct autobiographical elements. Set in Back Creek Valley, southwestern Virginia, where Cather was born and lived til the age of nine, it also has characters with names that were, she explains, familiar to her from her parents’ talk about the old place, and features a child character in its final chapter who is clearly a Cather-analogue.

But the two primary characters are the ones in the title: Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, a white woman from more respectable parts of Virginia who married a mill owner considerably below her in social station, and Nancy, her enslaved maid and the daughter of her enslaved housekeeper. Sapphira, middle-aged, has become severely physically disabled, suffering from dropsy (oedema) that makes her feet and legs swell painfully. Nancy, nineteen, is a light-skinned beauty, and also has a gentleness and sensitivity about her that has made her the favourite of her mistress—until now. Sapphira’s jealousy is aroused by rumours about Nancy’s paternity and about her husband’s obvious fondness for the girl, and as the novel opens, she has “taken against” her for several months. The book’s overarching plot is to do with Sapphira’s increasingly horrifying complicity in Nancy’s persecution by her rakish nephew Martin, and the rescue that is achieved by the Colberts’ adult daughter, Rachel, with her father’s knowledge and passive assistance.

Rachel is a reader extension, in a way; she recognises the things about the way her family lives that the other characters cannot. She is an abolitionist at heart and secretly receives radical newspapers from the like-minded postmistress, which she burns after reading. Her position in the novel is technically a white saviour one: Nancy’s escape is entirely down to Rachel’s activity. And yet she also sees the nasty complexity of the social situation, the way most of her mother’s enslaved servants accept the system just as her mother does. (The Colberts are unusual for being slaveowners; southwestern Virginia has long been, and still is, a poor, remote and mountainous area, where white people tended to have enough difficulty farming smallholdings, lacking the resources or the status-seeking desire to purchase or keep enslaved people.) The oldest of the enslaved people on the Colbert property, Old Jezebel, remembers her capture in Africa (initially as a prisoner of internecine wars), and the Middle Passage, and her difficulties in learning to speak English, but she dies partway through the book: the physical brutalities of the trade are mentioned but not dwelt upon. Rachel disapproves of her mother’s slaveholding, and rescues Nancy because she knows it’s the right thing to do, but she never openly challenges the status quo.

And yet, within the moral universe of the novel, the warping effect of slaveholding is made very clear. Sapphira, without ever acknowledging to herself or anyone else what she is doing, attempts to orchestrate the rape of a teenager whom she owns. More than once, she puts Nancy, alone, in Martin Colbert’s path, sometimes in a geographically isolated location such as the woods, knowing that he has a history of “dishonouring” young women. All of the little kindnesses we have seen her show to dying Jezebel, her affection for the old houseman Washington and her beloved housekeeper, Nancy’s mother, Till, evaporate when the reader is faced with that understanding. It reminded me strongly of Valerie Martin’s Property, a much later exploration (by a white woman) of the corruption of a white woman’s soul by the institution of slavery. Nancy herself is not deeply characterised and lacks agency—she is young, sweet, thoughtful, profoundly un-flirtatious, a “good girl”—but when she returns at the novel’s end, post-emancipation, dressed in silks and furs and with a well-paying job as a housekeeper in Montreal, she has a dignity and authority that implies greater complexity. In 1940 and from a white author, Sapphira and the Slave Girl is probably as explicit an acknowledgment of the material and moral devastation of race-based slavery as we were ever going to get.

This is my final American Classics book—I’ve done it, I’ve read one a month for a whole year! Stay tuned for a roundup and reflections post later this month.

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826). ~~The usual warnings apply regarding detailed discussion of the plot. I will use the word “Indians” throughout this review to refer to indigenous Americans, partly because Cooper does so in the text.~~

Cooper was one of the first authors to really make a name for himself as a practitioner of specifically American literature, and as such, you’d think we might have to read more of him in school. But not a bit of it; I was never assigned a single word of his work. Very possibly, this was for the obvious reason that teaching The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper’s best-known book, would require a dedication to tactful but honest discussions about the way he imagines indigenous Americans, mixed-race people, and the white colonial presence. And yet Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn requires the same teaching approach, and many people seem to have read that in school. Perhaps it’s because of Cooper’s style; writing nearly sixty years before Twain, and thirty years before Hawthorne, he’s closer in tone and thematic interests to the romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, with a lot of convolution even in his descriptions of action scenes. And yet the age of a book really is just a number; I found Mohicans more interesting and rewarding than Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Or maybe it’s because Mohicans is a historical novel, and the idea of trying to get high schoolers to keep straight the differences between fictional 1757 (when the book is set) and actual 1826 (when it was composed) seems like a fruitless struggle.

The plot of Mohicans is basically a two-act structure, and there is a lot going on. In the first act, we meet Alice and Cora Munro, the daughters of the British commander of the colonial Fort William Henry on the shores of Lake George in New York State. The British are fighting the combined resources of French general Montcalm and his allies among the Huron Indians. The girls are journeying from a different British stronghold, Fort Edward, to be with their father. They are accompanied by a white British soldier, Duncan Heyward; a comic-relief singing-master named David Gamut, whom I found pointlessly irritating until he was given a surprisingly important function in the plot; and, initially, an Indian pathfinder named Magua. On their way, they meet Natty Bumppo, aka Hawkeye, a white man who has lived and trained with Indians as a scout for most of his life, and his two companions, Chingachgook and his son Uncas, who are the last survivors of the Mohican tribe; they have been adopted by the local Delaware Indians but are of different lineage. Hawkeye identifies Magua as a Huron and immediately distrusts him, offering his and his friends’ services as guides instead. This turns out to be a good idea. Magua comes back with reinforcements, the group spends a few nights defending themselves from the position of an island mid-river riddled with caves, Hawkeye and the Indians leave (reasoning that they’re more valuable dead than the two girls are), Magua explains his desire for vengeance against Colonel Munro (who introduced him to alcohol when he was working for the British, then whipped him for drunkenness) and offers Cora her life if she’ll agree to marry him; she refuses, the gang is saved by Hawkeye and the Indians (and we get our first hint that Uncas might be falling in love with Cora), and they sneak past the French siege of Fort William Henry to be reunited with their father.

In the second act, the stakes get even higher and the tension tenser. Munro, seeing that he’s severely outnumbered and his request for reinforcements has been refused, surrenders the fort without a fight. The British refugees, including women and children, are meant to be allowed to leave safely, but the Huron Indians allied with the French massacre them as they leave—a genuinely horrifying scene that begins with the apparently unprovoked murder of a single infant and its mother, then snowballs into all-out carnage. In the uproar, Magua abducts Cora and Alice; David Gamut follows them. The rest of the novel is (and this is a substantial simplification) taken up with the quest of Hawkeye, Heyward, Munro, Chingachgook, and Uncas to locate and rescue the women, a project that involves making use of Gamut’s status among the Hurons as a holy madman (because he won’t stop singing psalms), a bear carcass traditionally worn by the Huron shaman (cunningly used as a disguise), and complex diplomatic maneuvres with the extremely elderly chief Tamenund (who actually died in 1701, but shh, fiction!)

This is more plot than almost any of my American Classics reading project books have so far required me to summarise, and now that I’ve done it, what have I got to say? I’d like to talk about Cora. She is the daughter of Colonel Munro, but only the half-sister of Alice, and from the start we know there’s something unusual about her: her hair is dark, her blood “rich”, and her general demeanour is brave, protective, and proud. (Alice is hopeless, and hopelessly boring, a blonde drip who spends much of the second act unconscious. She is, of course, the beloved of Duncan Heyward.) Cora, it turns out, is mixed-race: her mother, Munro’s first wife, was from the West Indies and descended from a lineage that—at some undetermined point in the past—included enslaved people. It’s hard from this description to work out how un-white Cora is meant to be, visually; Cooper makes it possible for her to “pass”, although I prefer to think of her as a young Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton. At the time of Cooper’s writing, the “one-drop rule” was not yet codified in law, and we’re clearly meant to include Cora in the group of white people.

Yet she distinguishes herself from the group of whites, too, and with positive attributes: her courage, practicality, and morally principled decision-making. Both villainous Magua and princely Uncas desire her. Her refusal of Magua’s sexual advances is complemented by her murder at Uncas’s side (after which he too is killed), and their funeral rites in the novel’s final chapter figure the two of them as fundamentally married and belonging together in the afterlife, although as far as we can tell they never even touched each other while alive. On the one hand, this is easily read as a kind of racial-sexual determinism: Cora, the queenly but outcast mulatta, and Uncas, the kingly but doomed (because the last of his tribe) Indian, are “appropriate” mates for each other, in the same way that Heyward and Alice are an “appropriate” match in terms of race and class. On the other hand, Cooper makes us feel the kindred-ness of Cora’s and Uncas’s souls, even without making direct courtship part of the story; both react in similar ways to adversity, both seem to value the same sorts of behaviour, both are deeply loyal. What he has done, as an author, is what often seems to happen in fiction when a force like racist ideology comes into conflict with the instincts of a creator: almost against his will, Cooper has written characters who, while supposed to play second fiddle to a white romance, are actually far more engaging, unique, and complex. Alice and Heyward are meant to be our hero/-ine pairing, but who remembers them?

There’s absolutely scads more to talk about here, including the historical political situation that Cooper represents; the incredible complexity of tribal alliances with colonial powers before the Revolution (I recommend supplementing this, if you read it, with Wikipedia, which will at least give you some sense of who belongs to what Indian nation and which Europeans they’re allied with); and the character and motivation of Hawkeye, who has chosen to live outside of “civilisation”, loving Chingachgook like a brother and Uncas like a son, while also being the character who most frequently insists on his own racial purity. The writing style is a touch prolix, but if you can read Trollope, you can read Cooper. His other work is far, far less readily available than this one novel, but I wouldn’t say no to reading him again.

This is the eleventh book I’ve read in 2023 for my American Classics reading project, and also the earliest-written! I’ll be posting my final book in December, followed by a wrap-up post reflecting on the project.

The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851). ~~The usual caveats apply regarding “spoilers” and detailed discussion of the plot~~

This is the oldest book I’ve read so far for the American Classics reading project, its publication date a good ten years behind the previous holder of that status (Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl). I doubt that this fact is directly responsible for Gables being my least favourite read of this project thus far—I am, after all, attempting to complete a PhD on Georgian and Regency writing—but it seems unlikely that it’s completely irrelevant, either.

For one thing, one of my primary issues with Gables is stylistic. Hawthorne provides a throwaway description of a main character, the elderly Hepzibah Pyncheon, as using many words when a few would do; clearly no one ever told the man that dwellers in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Like Dickens on a bender, Hawthorne stretches descriptions of minor events to almost unimaginable lengths. One entire chapter is an extended observational study of the corpse of Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon as it sits in the parlor of the Seven Gables for a whole day and night. The chapter is about twenty (ebook) pages long, and the punchline is the narrator revealing to us that the Judge is dead. We know! Because we are not total idiots! What makes this prolixity so frustrating is that there are the bones of something creepy under it all. A chapter that lavishes an entire day’s worth of book-time on examining a dead body is trying to do something, something about hypocrisy and mortality and irony and the nature of horror. There is a universe in which Hawthorne writes a version of The House of the Seven Gables that manages this.

Some elements work very well indeed. A sense of claustrophobia and stagnation is evoked brilliantly through setting choice alone: we barely read of anything happening outside the house, or at the very most its garden and the street it faces, for the first sixteen chapters (out of twenty-one). Hawthorne effectively conveys a sense of a depressing, dusty, enormous, dark, mostly-shut-up house, and the significance of that environment for the moods of its inhabitants. When Clifford and Hepzibah leave town and get on a steam train, it’s unbelievably startling; we sort of understand that they’re living in the nineteenth century, but the shock of transition from their dark, quiet world to the movement, noise, and bustle of long-distance transport is as severe as if they’ve time-traveled, highlighting their extreme isolation. Successful though this depiction is, though, it doesn’t necessarily make the reading experience more compelling. Combined with the floridity of the prose, the peculiar pacing (multiple consecutive chapters detailing Hepzibah’s first day keeping shop; a single chapter on her and Clifford’s brief existence as fugitives from Salem), the extremely guessable twists and the relative simplicity of the characterisation, it’s not easy to find a reason to keep reading.

For me, the thematic heart of The House of the Seven Gables is its exploration of dispossession, theft, and fraud as the true legacy of colonial America. The “curse” under which the Pyncheon family is supposed to labour was allegedly cast by a man named Matthew Maule, who was falsely convicted of witchcraft under the auspices of seventeenth-century founding patriarch Colonel Pyncheon. When Maule was executed, his property—a piece of land which Colonel P had long coveted—went up for sale; Pyncheon bought it, and, to add insult to injury, contracted Maule’s son, a carpenter, to build him a family mansion on that plot. Maule is said to have uttered his curse on the steps of the gallows: “God will give him blood to drink!” Most of the plot of Gables is about teasing the idea that this curse might be real, before revealing that nothing supernatural actually took place; the Pyncheon men have simply been dying of hereditary apoplexies. My reading of the curse, though, is as an allegory—one which Hawthorne may have only written unconsciously, or subconsciously—of American settler colonialism and the very concept of “property” in the New World. What are Matthew Maule and his descendants but a deracialised instance of a people whose land and heritage is stolen from them? What is Colonel Pyncheon, and his nineteenth-century avatar Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, but a symbol of the abuse of power, and specifically state-sanctioned violence, to oppress and disenfranchise? And what is “Maule’s curse” but a consequence of the foundational taints of the American nation—the displacement and genocide of indigenous Americans and the institution of race-based slavery? “Blood to drink”, indeed: The House of the Seven Gables was published just a decade before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter.

Having done what I feel is my duty by writing this review in good faith, however, I will end by pointing you to this Goodreads review, which caustically sums up much of what makes Gables such a frustrating reading experience.

This is my tenth book for the American Classics reading project! And I suppose it probably counts for R(eaders) I(mbibing) P(eril) XVIII, too. Although it really isn’t scary.

The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896).

There’s some debate over whether this qualifies as a novel or is rather a series of sketches, but as the sketches are unified by setting, characters, and time frame, I’m going to go ahead and comfortably call it a novel; perhaps a novella, since it’s so short (179 pages in my ebook edition). My copy came from Project Gutenberg, but hard copies tend to include the “other stories” as mentioned in the image above, presumably to justify printing costs. For such a short work, though, it’s powerfully evocative and emotionally engaging, taking place over the course of a single summer on the shore country and islands of eastern Maine. Our narrator-protagonist is never named but seems something of a stand-in for Jewett herself: she is a woman writer, apparently traveling alone and, while not yet middle-aged, past her first youth, who comes to the Maine coast to complete some work in rural solitude.

The town where she ends up for the summer is named Dunnet Landing, and her landlady is the redoubtable Mrs. Almira Todd, whose skill as an herbalist has made her a particularly well-known and respected member of the community. Much of the book is structured around the stories told to the narrator by the inhabitants of Dunnet Landing, and her adventures following up the threads of local history. The characters are beautifully drawn, with their interests, capacities and vulnerabilities all presented. Mrs. Todd, for example, is a widow, but her late husband—while kind, good to her, and mentioned with much affection—was not her true love, a secret revealed in tender, dignified dialogue with our nameless narrator. In one multi-chapter episode, she takes the narrator over to Green Island in a tiny boat to visit her mother, the eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Blackett, who still lives there in almost perfect solitude apart from her sexagenarian fisherman son William. Mrs. Blackett’s health, good humour, and hospitality are complemented by William’s diffidence and shyness, but even he warms up over the course of the afternoon. As the narrator enjoys a simple meal with these isolated but very engaged people, wanders over the beautiful fields and cliffs of the minuscule island, and picks pennyroyal with Mrs. Todd (who insists the best specimens can’t be found on the mainland), the reader realises the gravity of Mrs. Todd’s youthful marriage into village life, the significance of distance even in places that are relatively near each other. It could have been written so as to make it seem provincial and foolish, but instead, Jewett makes us understand the fierce attachment to place in a very specific, very localised way, and the implications for families in these environments when someone marries, moves, or otherwise changes their circumstances.

Dunnet Landing at the time of the novel no longer has a significant seagoing industry, but Captain Littlepage—a villager who comes up to the narrator’s favourite writing nook, a deserted schoolhouse, and regales her with stories—remembers a different world. Whaling and commercial trading were two facets of a merchant marine that turned the Maine coast into a hub of travel in the mid-nineteenth century. Mrs. Todd’s friend, Mrs. Fosdick, remembers male family members bringing back trinkets from India and the Caribbean, even living abroad herself as a young girl when her father took his whole family on a voyage with him. (She recalls that the bundle containing all her clothing was left on shore in the rush to embark, so she wore boys’ trousers and shirt throughout the voyage, and missed the freedom of movement when they reached their destination, upon which her mother immediately put her into skirts again.) There was more cosmopolitanism in those days, the older folks agree; more interest in the world’s greatness and wonder. Nowadays, Captain Littlepage complains, the village can’t see beyond the local elections for postmaster. It’s a very interesting insight into the way that macroeconomic ebbs and flows affect individual communities. (It’s also not one that a twenty-first century reader, in an age of globalised commerce, expects; we know the story about a small rural community becoming increasingly homogenised through exposure to other cultures, but we’re less familiar with what happens when that exposure is removed and the community sinks back into narrow horizons. Perhaps the nearest familiar analogy is the departure of Rome from Britain.)

The most moving anecdote might be the story of “poor Joanna”, a Dunnet Landing woman whose fiancé jilted her. In the grip of grief and penance, she moves herself and all her belongings out to a half-deserted croft on the tiny Shell-heap Island, which she has inherited from her father. Nor is this a petulant temporary circumstance: Joanna lives there for years, until she dies. She is not completely devoid of company or nutrition, since local fishermen often throw fruit, vegetables, or a fraction of their catch onto the shore for her to collect, and she has her own chickens and a patch of vegetables, in addition to the island’s native herbs and plants. Initially, parties of sightseers view her as an additional tourist attraction, until she politely lets it be known that she would prefer this not to continue. Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Fosdick both remember her fondly and sadly, and the narrator learns that when Joanna died, the entire town sailed out to Shell-heap Island for her funeral. The episode almost feels medieval: a self-imposed hermitage for a self-sufficient woman, her village nevertheless refusing to entirely abandon her, the sense of responsibility and neighbourliness that keeps a homestead on the mainland vigilant with a telescope every morning, checking for smoke from Joanna’s chimney as proof of life.

All of these stories, from all of these proud and independent people, are recounted with the utmost respect and affection for their ways of life. No one in Dunnet Landing is perfect—Mrs. Todd has her secret, doomed love; Mrs. Fosdick is overbearing if well-meaning; Captain Littlepage’s sanity wanders in and out—but Jewett represents life there as generally pleasant and kind, its inhabitants as altruistic and generous. It is rare to see rural communities portrayed with such even-handed attentiveness. Willa Cather loved the book, and fans of Cather’s will find plenty to love here, as will devotees of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. I found The Country of the Pointed Firs immensely enjoyable and deeply moving—it might well make its way onto my Best of 2023 list.

This is my ninth book for my 2023 American Classics reading project, meaning I’m still managing one a month.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (1966).

Most people know this as the first “nonfiction novel” published in America (although there are apparently several titles vying for that distinction, In Cold Blood is by far the most famous.) It’s based on the real-life murder of the Clutter family, consisting of successful Kansan farmer Herb Clutter, his occasionally depressive but gentle and kind-hearted wife Bonnie, their sweet, thoughtful pre-teen son Kenyon, and their teenage daughter Nancy, beloved by all at school and at home. In November 1959 they were found dead in their home by a neighbour checking up on them before church. All had been tied up and shot at point-blank range, each in a separate room of the house; Mr. Clutter’s throat had also been cut. The only clues were two bloody shoeprints. The closest neighbour, a hired man who lived on the property with his wife and baby, had heard nothing. Very little had been stolen: Kenyon’s portable radio, Herb’s binoculars, and no more than fifty dollars in cash.

For six weeks, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had virtually nothing. After that, a phone call from Floyd Wells, a prisoner at the Kansas State Penitentiary, clarified matters: he had previously worked as a farmhand for Mr. Clutter and had mentioned this fact to Richard Hickock, his cellmate. Hickock had pressed for details, and Wells at some point implied that Mr. Clutter, as a prosperous man, kept a safe with ten thousand dollars in cash on the premises. (In fact, Herb rarely kept cash on him at all and conducted business by cheque.) Paroled, Hickock contacted another former cellmate, Perry Smith, about helping him with “the perfect score”: a robbery of the Clutter safe. Herb’s polite protestations that he had no such stash of money around the place only irritated the men. They bound the family separately, and Hickock spent some time searching the house for a secret hiding spot. When he didn’t find one, either both men or Perry Smith alone shot each member of the Clutter family, beginning with Herb, whose throat he first cut in the basement.

It is, in short, a pretty nasty story about an extremely gruesome and senseless crime, and it is understandable to wonder why anyone would want to read about it. The answer, as so often with books of this nature, is in Capote’s approach and writing style. He weaves three strands together: one following the Clutter family before their deaths, establishing them as people with lives and foibles and friends; one following the investigators, primarily Alvin Dewey and his family; and one following the killers, both before and after the murders (including their trials, five-year stay on Death Row, and executions). Capote sensitively avoids imaginging the murders in the moment, as it were. We see Hickock and Smith drive up to the farmhouse, and we see them drive away, but actual descriptions of the killings only come much later, and take the form of Dewey’s deductions from the state of the crime scene plus Hickock and Smith’s later confessions. It’s an intelligent way to both maintain tension (we know that the Clutters have been killed “off-screen”, but we haven’t seen anything yet) and retain the dignity of the murdered family. (Mind you, not everyone thinks this. Tom Wolfe wrote an essay in 1967 called “Pornoviolence” in which he suggested that Capote’s primary achievement in this book is basically a tease: “the book’s suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end”.)

Character is key. Later, Capote was accused of inventing and sensationalizing large portions of individual characters, particularly Mrs. Clutter (Bonnie), whose level of clinical depression is represented in the book as pretty high. This was contested by surviving family members and others who knew her, and it’s easy to imagine both that Capote exaggerated for effect and that locals might have felt defensive about the suggestion of mental illness regarding one of their own (particularly in the 1960s). This accounts for the “nonfiction novel” aspect of the book. In Cold Blood was researched and written almost simultaneously, in a boots-on-the-ground way, and the events it recounts did happen, but it might be more accurate to think of it as “based on a true story”, as movies often say. Capote brings the flair and eye for detail of a fiction writer to the terrible experiences of real people, making them alive to us. Nancy Clutter’s favourite horse, the ancient and stocky Babe, is a touchstone, evoking summer evenings when Nancy and her friend Sue would swim in a local river on the horse’s broad back. Perry Smith’s self-importance and arrogant rage is offset by his habit of playing the guitar and harmonica, his damaged legs, his childhood as the son of two mismatched daredevil rodeo riders. Dick Hickock is by far the less sympathetically portrayed of the two, but again, Capote does it with detail: Hickock’s kindly and ineffectual parents, his admitted paedophilia, his habit of intentionally swerving to run over stray dogs.

The existence of In Cold Blood at all is in some ways a moral question. How do you write a book about awful things and do it sensitively and ethically and also in a way that is aesthetically significant? It’s a question with which the entire true-crime genre, of which Capote could be seen as the modern godfather, must wrestle. Classics of the genre—Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—are the ones that seem to manage it. But then, the re-presentation of the worst day of someone’s life is always going to demand justification. I think Capote succeeds at several things: at humanising people who were so much more than just “murder victims”; at exhibiting the interpersonal dynamic between two men who killed; at demonstrating the appalling nature of capital punishment, without ever engaging in active polemic; and at rounding off the story neatly, in the final cemetery scene between Dewey and Nancy’s friend Sue Kidwell (which Dewey later alleged was entirely fictitious). Don’t take In Cold Blood as the gospel truth on the Clutter murders, but rather as a tool for empathic understanding in a more general, symbolic way.

This is the eighth book in my American Classics reading project, and the second piece of nonfiction, sort of. (The other was Harry Crews’s memoir A Childhood, from January.)

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (1922).

This is the story of a midlife crisis.

One of the historical criticisms of Babbitt has been that it has no plot. George F. Babbitt, the protagonist, is a realtor, with a brown, drab wife named Myra, a serious daughter in her 20s named Verona, a son in his late teens, the irrepressible Ted, and a ten-year-old daughter nicknamed Tinka, who retains her childhood aura of innocence and indifference throughout most of the novel. They live in the unimpeachable suburb of Floral Heights in the small Midwestern city of Zenith, variously said to have been modeled on Cincinnati, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. The first few chapters take up just one day in Babbitt’s life, getting the reader fully acquainted and situated with the social atmosphere of middle-class, business-owning Zenith. Babbitt is a Republican voter, a Presbyterian, pro-business and anti-immigration, jovially and impersonally antisemitic, a member of the Athletic Club, the Boosters Club, and the Order of Good Fellows. He is, in other words, a certain kind of Americana personified. What precipitates the change in his life, partway through the novel, is his friend Paul. Paul shoots his own wife, Zilla, in despair at the aridity and unhappiness of their marriage, for which he can see no end in sight. He doesn’t kill her, but maims her for life, and is sentenced to several years in prison.

This event is an earthquake for Babbitt. When he first hears that Paul has shot Zilla—recounted to him over the phone by Myra—he is too busy boasting to her of his election to vice president of the Athletic Club to listen to what she is saying; she has to repeat herself more than three times. The news shakes his provincial self-satisfaction to the core. This feels right to me. Bereavement, crime, the intrusion of violence: those are things that can change the material quality of a life in a moment, and therefore they are also things that can force introspection, a kind of reckoning. In Babbitt’s case, he is not intellectual enough to think through his own dissatisfaction, but he is just sensitive enough to feel it properly for the first time in years. His response is to have an affair with a customer, the splendidly-named widow Mrs. Tanis Judique. Tanis’s friends are bohemians, or as bohemian as you can get in the Midwest in the 1920s: they flout Prohibition openly, drive too fast, throw loud parties, stay up late, quarrel publicly. Babbitt’s sojourn among “the Bunch” is, in a manner of speaking, a bid for mental and spiritual freedom (reflected also by his vocal championing of Seneca Doane, a local lawyer he had previously decried, along with his Booster Club pals, as an unpatriotic socialist). But ultimately it’s just as empty a life as the suburban rounds of Sunday School committees and dinner parties, and Babbitt isn’t well suited to this form of rebellion, either.

What brings him back is Myra’s sudden illness. She has already confronted him, in desperation and anger, about his affair, in a passage which contains some of Lewis’s most incisive and honest writing on the sexual double standard and the cruel asymmetry of white suburban middle-class male entitlement to the labours and loyalties of their wives. When she is suddenly taken into hospital and has to undergo major surgery, Babbitt repents: he realises that he does love her, cannot bear the thought of her death, and he has already lost nearly all of his friends over his sociopolitical non-conformism. It is the mirror image of Paul’s attempted murder, and it has the same effect, like an amnesiac being hit hard on the head again. The threat of mortality can bounce us out of our daily rut, or throw us back in.

At the end of the novel, Babbitt has returned to the bosom of Presbyterianism, Republicanism, monogamy, and commerce. His son Ted, however, ends the book on a note that echoes the generational-change aspect of The Age of Innocence‘s ultimate scene. He elopes with Eunice Littlefield, the literal girl next door. Ted’s announcement that Eunice is now his wife is met with horror and resistance by both Myra and Verona (whose allegedly radical social ideas demonstrably do not stand up to the test). But Babbitt—the conservative patriarch par excellence—wonders if it’s really all that bad. After all, what’s done is done, and Eunice seems a nice girl. The final sentence of the book has “the Babbitt men” setting out to confront the disapproval of their womenfolk.

So it’s the story of one man’s midlife crisis. But it’s also a tragedy, read one way—Babbitt is ultimately too complacent to change his life—and a bittersweet Shakespearean comedy read another way—Babbitt runs around the Athenian woods for a while but ultimately finds his way home. It’s also worth thinking about the novel as a microcosmic representation of something that was happening on a wider scale. America’s midlife crisis, perhaps, as its manufacturing and political importance became global, as it became pompous, morally compromised by prosperity, lost its youthful zip.

This is the seventh book for my year-long American Classics reading project.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1885)

As per previous statements, I do not believe it is possible to “spoil the plot” of a 138-year-old book, but be advised that the following review makes details of the plot explicit.

The majority of my primary and secondary education took place in America, and it was about as diverse as you can get. I went to state schools, private schools, co-educational and girls-only schools, schools with sixteen kids per year and schools with four hundred kids per year, schools in the city and in the country, and was even—for one extremely memorable year—taught at home with my best friend, whose parents hired tutors for us in all subjects and otherwise allowed us to roam, twelve years old and half-feral, across the acres of their immense farm. Somehow, however, despite all of that, I was never assigned Huckleberry Finn as a set text! And I’d never succeeded in reading it off my own bat, either… until now.

The book’s reputation precedes it. Ernest Hemingway’s assessment can’t help but hang over it: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” If you are American and half-literate, you probably know the plot, but lots of you aren’t American, so: it’s a sequel of sorts to Twain’s earlier novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. When Sawyer ends, Tom and his best friend Huck have both acquired about six thousand dollars as a reward for apprehending some robbers. When Huckleberry Finn opens, Huck is living with the kind-hearted but rather stifling Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, who are trying to “sivilize” him. (His father, Pap Finn, is an abusive drunk and drifter.) Pap reappears, attempts to seize Huck’s fortune, then abducts his son and imprisons him in a backwoods cabin while violently physically abusing him. Huck fakes his own death, sets off down the Mississippi River in a makeshift raft, and almost immediately comes across an enslaved man he knows named Jim, who has run away from Miss Watson and is determined to make it to a free state. (Missouri, at the time, was slave-holding, while neighbouring Illinois was not.) To summarise even more baldly, hijinks ensue. (For the reassurance of the chronically anxious: Jim is eventually freed by default, when it is discovered that Miss Watson has died and manumitted him as a condition of her will.)

One of the more immediately arresting things about Huckleberry Finn, particularly if (like me) you’ve only read Tom Sawyer, is its willingness to engage closely with dark and violent material. Pap Finn is terrifying. Huck witnesses the murders of two youths in the episode of the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons; he writes of not wanting to describe the details of what he saw, that thinking of it makes him feel “sick”. In another incident, a country doctor talks down a mob intent on lynching him. Two con men with whom Huck and Jim fall in, the King and the Duke, are eventually tarred and feathered by pissed-off townspeople. Tom Sawyer, who reappears in the final chapters of the book, receives a gunshot wound to the lower leg and is delirious with fever for days. Huck himself generally escapes serious injury, perhaps because he is our point of view character, but the world in which he lives and in which Twain immerses the reader is unreliable and largely careless of the young, the weak, or the unprotected. The violence is, I think, partly for comic effect—there’s a very strong whiff of Don Quixote about Huckleberry Finn—but the comedy has an edge, the atmosphere of the whole novel has a wildness, that makes it the opposite of sterile, mean-minded satire.

It is also, notoriously, one of the most challenged/banned books in American history. Mostly this is because Twain uses the n-word throughout the novel with reference to Jim and other Black characters. For my money, the tenor of the book is fairly clear about the cruelty and dehumanisation of race-based slavery and the arc of Huck’s character bends towards discovery that the “morals” he has been taught by his society (that Black people are property, that helping Jim to escape is equivalent to theft) are not ones he can bring himself to follow. At the same time, it is not necessarily a book I would suggest teaching to high schoolers, simply because the n-word is so very prevalent. From an instruction perspective, you’d have to avoid reading almost any of it out loud in class; you’d also have to spend a considerable amount of time preparing and guiding your students through Twain’s complex deployment of irony via a child point-of-view character. It’s not that teenagers can’t understand this, it’s just that there are other classics of American literature that don’t need to be engaged with quite this level of delicacy. (One obvious response would be to set a study text by a Black author of this time period, instead.) Banning Huckleberry Finn flat out doesn’t seem like a good answer, though. Contextualising it wherever it remains available to the general public is better, though by no means perfect. I suppose, though, the fact that the conversation goes on means that the novel continues to matter.

This is the sixth book in my American Classics reading project. I’m really pleased and amazed that I’ve made it halfway through the year without slackening!

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs (1861)

A quick housekeeping note: last week, at the end of a work trip to France, some orange juice spilled in my bag and went all over my laptop, which promptly died. It’s currently in the hands of specialists and my hope is that data recovery will be possible, if not full power restoration, but it’ll take some time. For now, I’m writing on my phone, so please excuse any infelicities of formatting–Jetpack, the new WordPress app, is a little glitchy on small screens.

Harriet Jacobs’s book was the first first-person account of slavery by a woman to be published in the United States. It was printed privately the year that the American Civil War began. Jacobs’s work was edited by Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist who had previously edited biographies of several men involved in aiding and protecting runaway slaves once they reached the North. The presence of an editorial hand always makes me a little nervous (and is in fact responsible for a large portion of the second chapter of my thesis)–how much input have they had? In this case, it appears, surprisingly little; Child may have tidied up some of Jacobs’s phrasing and advised on structure, but the book is Jacobs’s work.

And what a story. Born into slavery, but with a free grandmother, Jacobs always worked in a domestic capacity, not in the fields. As she reached adolescence, her owner, Dr. Flint, began to make aggressive sexual overtures to  her. To avoid being forced into sex with him, she chose another white man with whom to enter a relationship, a Mr. Sands, by whom she had two children. She represents this as a pragmatic exercise: she and Sands do not appear to feel much love for each other, but he isn’t cruel and she calculates he is more likely to help her free her children. When she discusses this in retrospect, she clearly understands how vulnerable she is to charges of promiscuity, and she uses that vulnerability to her own advantage: Incidents is an unabashedly political book, a deeply polemical anti-slavery work, and she uses examples like this to underscore the devastating moral effects of the slave system. She is not ashamed of what she has been forced to do to survive, and several other anecdotes (like that of her friend Luke, whose brutal master eventually dies and from whose deathbed Luke manages to illicitly acquire money) are presented in similar terms.

In fact, the tropes and techniques of sentimental fiction are everywhere in Incidents (yet another way in which it has surprising resonance with my thesis). Slavery was often dealt with in 19th-century reform literature in the same way as prostitution was handled in the 18th century: as a system that operated through force and cruelty, that ripped families apart in the quest for profit, that was profoundly anti-Christian for that reason, and from which those unfortunates involved in it needed saving. Obviously, slavery and the sale of sex are not identical activities, and it behoves us in the 21st century to be very careful and precise about what exactly we mean when we talk about sex work and public policy. At the same time, the sexual coercion and violence visited upon enslaved people was central to the functioning of slavery and cannot be separated from it or ignored. Jacobs’s use of sentimental techniques like direct address to the reader and invocation of “natural feeling”, her reiteration of anecdotes that circled in abolitionist circles (and may therefore have had reference to no specific situation), and her account of Dr Flint’s predatory behaviour (which  although in a wildly different context, will have a familiar shape to readers of Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela) all contribute to the resonance. Jacobs’s narrative makes it utterly clear that antebellum slavery relied on rape.

Probably the best-known thing about Jacobs is the fact that she spent seven years hiding in a crawl space under her grandmother’s roof, having fled Dr. Flint at last and making it appear as if she had gone north. Instead, she remained right under his nose, able (just) to see and hear her children every day, although they were not told the truth and believed she had gone north, too. The incredible audacity of such a proceeding gives you some idea of what Jacobs is like as a human being: fiercely protective of her children, extremely courageous, stubborn. After she and her children manage to leave the South, her beloved grandmother dies, sending a final letter to Jacobs in which she recommends passive acceptance of God’s will. It is not at all the kind of relationship Jacobs herself appears to have with God, although her long confinement with only a Bible to read gave her an extraordinarily deep knowledge of Christian scripture. Instead, she more often furiously questions God’s goodness and omnipotence, notes the hypocrisy of white Southern Christians, and laments the sufferings her family experiences. One of her most frequently alluded-to texts is the Book of Job.

The Fugitive Slave Law, which was passed in 1850, means that even the north isn’t safe for Jacobs: free states were required by law to help slaveholders from the south recapture runaways. Some states worked around this and some didn’t, but private bounty hunters and malicious informing was a constant threat. Her book has a happy ending: “not marriage,” she writes, self-aware about the genre tropes of sentimentality, “but freedom”. Her friends in the North purchase her from Dr. Flint and complete her manumission; at last, she is as free as her children. Even so, there is a note of frustration and melancholy: Jacobs wanted to purchase her own freedom. Her pride and tenacity are entirely sympathetic; for her, to be freed by others’ hands is the final indignity of slavery. It’s a lesson for our times, too: people dealing with systemic oppression don’t want saving, but empowering.

This is the fifth entry in my American Classics reading project, and my first by a Black woman.

Native Son, by Richard Wright (1940)

~~I do not accept that it is possible to “spoil the plot” of a book that has been in print for eighty-three years, but be advised that the following review makes plot details explicit!~~

My American Classics reading project coincided this month with Kaggsy and Simon’s 1940 club: I read Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was a sensation when first published and which, over the years, has had many grand claims made for it, including that it changed American literature and African-American literature for good. The novel tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black man in his early twenties living on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1930s. Reluctantly accepting a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family, Bigger’s first day is marked by the family’s daughter Mary, and her Communist boyfriend Jan Erlone, attempting to befriend him, but doing so in a way that triggers all of his terrors about transgressing the standards of behaviour that white people demand from Black people. That night, he brings Mary back home drunk, and accidentally smothers her while attempting to keep her quiet. The rest of the book relates his efforts to shift the blame onto Jan, then to take advantage of the situation by writing a false ransom note and enlisting his sometime-girlfriend Bessie to collect the money, then the discovery of Mary’s body and his flight, murder of Bessie, and eventual capture. It ends with a fairly sensational account of his trial and sentencing to death.

It’s a book that seems to mean something slightly different to everyone who reads it—even to the same person at different times, as David Bradley’s excellent article “On Re-reading Native Son” would suggest. It’s a book that seems ripe for high school literature courses, because it is so deeply thematic: you could assign essays on things like the role of religion and the symbolism of crosses (Bigger’s mother has a deep Christian faith which he rejects two or three times over the course of the novel), anti-Communist prejudice versus racist prejudice (Jan Erlone is a Communist and is nearly scapegoated for the murder; the fact that he gives Bigger worker’s-rights pamphlets to read is considered something of a smoking gun for his moral standing, and in the dialogue of the bigoted investigator, it’s hard to tell whether he hates “reds” or Black people more), whether the novel deals in stereotype or archetype (many Black critics have been anxious that whites reading Native Son will absorb only the notion that all Black men really are violent, inarticulate criminals). For some reason, I never did have to read the novel in school—instead we read Wright’s memoir, Black Boy, which must have been considered quite traumatic enough.

One thing that struck me forcefully about Native Son was the simplicity of its language. It is a capable, straightforward prose style that is not difficult to read but is not beautiful, either. Wright uses declarative sentences—not always short or simple, but never syntactically convoluted—interspersed only occasionally with a run-on style that mimics Bigger’s frantic thought processes. Much of the book is dialogue. It is 454 pages in my edition (including a 30-page introduction by Wright explaining how he developed the initial idea) but reads quickly. There is very little description, and the only philosophical abstraction we get is in Bigger’s own mental monologue. The effect is to keep the reader trapped in a confused and angry person’s head as he makes worse and worse mistakes.

The other thing that struck me was the horrible humour of the most violent sections of the novel. In this it reminded me a lot of Crime and Punishment (a comparison that was apparently also made by Dorothy Canfield when she wrote an early introduction for the novel, although she refused to place Dostoevsky and Wright on the same footing as literary artists). After Bigger has killed Mary Dalton, he must dispose of her body. The surreal account of lugging her downstairs in a steamer trunk, attempting to push her corpse into the boiler in the basement, and being forced to cut off her head with a pocketknife (?!) and hatchet when it’s the only part that won’t fit, are so reminiscent of Raskolnikov running around the apartment building and hiding behind doors after the murder of Alyona Ivanovna. I found it funny in the Dostoevsky too, in a hideous sort of way. The only difference between this kind of physical hijinks and Charlie Chaplin’s, after all, is the presence of a freshly murdered corpse, and the laughter is the hysterical kind that verges on panic.

Bigger panics a lot. He’s not the mute, brutal idiot that he often pretends to be in the early days after the murder (to throw investigators off the scent), but he often errs because of strong emotion or short-term temptation. When he could leave well enough alone, or flee the city before he’s suspected, he instead decides to cash in on Mary’s disappearance by forging a ransom note (and thereby, hopefully, casting suspicion on Chicago’s Communists). When he could rake out the ashes of the furnace after burning Mary’s body, he doesn’t, leaving smoke to build up and causing the discovery of several small bones which haven’t disintegrated—it’s this that leads directly to his capture. When he could either continue refusing to tell Bessie the truth, or tell her and trust her with his life, he chooses the worst possible combination of options: he tells her he’s a killer, then decides he’ll have to kill her too, to keep her quiet. He can’t even manage this well: he beats her head in with a brick, throws her body down an airshaft, then remembers that the money he stole from Mary’s purse was in Bessie’s dress for safekeeping, and is now inaccessible to him. (As we find out later, Bessie isn’t even dead when he dumps her; she actually dies of hypothermia at the bottom of the airshaft.)

Wright apparently wrote Native Son after publishing a book of short stories called Uncle Tom’s Children which had “made the daughters of bankers weep”. He wanted to write a book that, as he put it, white people couldn’t cry over. Well, no, there’s certainly no sentimentality here. It’s difficult to read the story of Bigger Thomas as anything other than a hopeless indictment of the Black situation in America in 1940, and by extension, hard to see Wright’s viewpoint as anything other than deeply, bitterly cynical. James Baldwin certainly thought so. For what it’s worth, I think there’s real value in depicting anger and violence as a response to systemic oppression; it’s just not necessarily easy to go on from that point, literarily speaking. It feels more like a dead end than fertile soil in which more art could grow.

This is the fourth book in my American Classics reading project—I’m managing a pleasingly steady one per month, so far!