Now, I'm in catch-up phase. I have 4 books(5 if you include the first Robertson Davies book that is part of a trilogy in which the second novel won)to write about before I continue to move forward on my reading...

Book #101 was In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow. It won the Pulitzer in 1942, and was also made into a movie directed by John Huston, starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. This book is about family drama at its worst, and about lost dreams, lost times and lost lives. This novel is about the Timberlake family: the patriarch Asa, the mother, Lavinia, and the two daughters, Roy and Stanley. Men's names for female characters struck me as highly interesting, especially for a novel written in 1942. There is never any indication on behalf of the father and mother as to why they gave their daughters two male names, but there is also no indication on behalf of the author. Except perhaps for this: both female characters have strength, in their own ways, and even then, strength of character could be construed as a male-dominated attribute. Who knows.

Anyway, the entire novel is told from Asa Timberlake's point of view. Asa's family was extremely wealthy, but his parents' fortunes began to go downhill and his father took his own life, leaving the family at the mercy of relatives. He has a nowhere job at the factory which his father once owned, which is now owned by the uncle of his wife, Uncle William. It is clear that Asa's marriage is terrible, and he pretty much can't stand his wife, who is an invalid. Or rather, had a hard time dealing with the real world, and decided to check out physically instead. It appears at points that she is actually possibly more physically capable than she lets on, she just needs people to take care of her. Lavinia was used to a higher quality of living before she married Asa, and it seems that even now, over 20 years later, she still isn't over that. Asa, miserably unhappy, but trying not to be, lives his life vicariously through his grown daughters(both in their early 20s) and through his weekend trips out to the country to see Kate, the widow of his best friend, Jack.

Though the words of the novel are permeated by Asa's sense of loneliness and loss of time as he becomes an old man, the novel's action centers around Asa's two daughters, Stanley and Roy. As the novel opens, Stanley is to marry Craig, an attorney, and Roy is already married to Peter, a surgeon. Stanley(played by Bette Davis in the movie version) is complete and total trouble, though. She always wants what she can't have, and it appears that she needs to be at the center of attention at all times, or at the very least at the center of male attention at all times. She seduces Roy's husband Peter, and they run off together. This is hugely scandalous of course, but also downright mean of her to do. Of course, Stanley insists that she's in love with Peter, but it's pretty clear that she's just in love with attention. Asa realizes this in his narration, but there is not much he can do about it. Lavinia, his wife, is obsessed with Stanley and her beauty and everything that she stands for. To Lavinia, Stanley has everything that she didn't have as a young woman, and that jealousy/desire towards her own daughter has become over the years akin to idolatry. Uncle William, too, worships Stanley. He gives her a car, and other income so she can continue to be sheltered, because he feels like it's something she needs. Asa has much internal frustration towards this. He watches his elder daughter, Roy, begin to self-destruct as her marriage has fallen apart and due to the scandal that her sister has run away with her husband. Both Asa and Roy see Stanley for what she really is, but it seems that no one else really does.

Roy, played by Olivia de Havilland in the movie version, becomes quite the pillar of strength. Though shaken by the loss of her now ex-husband, who eventually, either through his own weakness of character, or guilt, or self-loathing or whatever, commits suicide, and drives Stanley back into the welcoming arms of her mother and uncle; Roy, makes an active and valiant decision to find strength in stoicism, and rebuilds her life. She hardens her heart in a survival mechanism, but finds herself befriending and eventually engaged to Stanley's jilted fiance, Craig.
It is at this point that Stanley returns home, a widow to a suicide. Roy and Craig's lives have been doing well enough, Asa even has some hope for the future of his favorite daughter, and though Lavinia has up until this point been pining the loss of Stanley, that's not really anything new, of course. Once again, Stanley is at the center of attention; pouty and tearful and subject to whatever tranquilizers a doctor can give her, she makes everyone cater to her needs. Roy is resentful, and rightfully so, Craig is also finding himself feeling sorry for Stanley and possibly seeing his feelings resurge. What a f---ing mess.

Stanley is a homewrecker, pure and simple. She is a hurricane that leaves destruction in her path, wherever she goes. And the end (SPOILER ALERT), makes this even clearer. She goes out in the rain in her car, driving fast and recklessly and hits and kills a small girl. She blames the entire incident(claiming she was in bed the whole time and that she wasn't even in her car), on a young black servant that the family has, and that he took the car out. The tragedy in this is that the family suspects that Stanley is at fault, but feel a need to protect her, as well as this young black man had such great promise and was going to go to university and eventually become a lawyer himself. The nights that he has to, as an innocent, spend in prison, do him in mentally and his dreams are over, all because of Stanley. Ugh.

Asa, as an old man is resigned to his fate, and to making the best of whatever snatches of happiness he can find. Roy is the one who, rightly so, is full of rage at how unjust everything is. This is quite the dramatic novel, full of emotion and family strife. It also depicts loneliness very well, and how you can live in a house full of people and still feel like you are all by yourself. If there is any theme that I have seen as a recurring one throughout the now 104 books that I've read, it's loneliness, and how the characters, representing the human condition in all its various facets, deal with that internal struggle. This book is no different, and there are several quotes which are related to this theme.

In the first quote, Roy is talking to her father...

"'I wonder...' she began and then broke off with a laugh. 'I suppose it is easier,' she continued after a pause, 'when the bottom drops out to drop with it. Mother is always saying that the bottom has dropped out of everything.'

He chuckled under his breath, as if he were afraid Lavinia might resent an improper sense of humor. 'A great tradition is an expensive luxury,' he said. 'Falling back on the past may lend inspiration, and it may also lead to gradual hardening of the arteries.'" (44)


The second quote is when Roy has decided to let Peter go, in her heart at least, to Stanley.

"'Poor Father.' Her voice wavered, but the next instant she had regained control of it. 'If you love me, you must leave me alone. I have to work things out in my own way. I have to save myself as I can. It may not be the right way, but it's mine.'

That was only the truth. Her enemy, he knew, was within the heart; for she was at the mercy of some antagonist more hostile than the mere abstraction called life. Her own will must bear her up; she must fight her inner conflicts in solitude. She belongs to another age, he thought; she is a part of the future, and I am still encrusted with the outworn shape of the past. I cannot share either her joy or her grief; all I can do is stand aside and sympathize from a distance. She is stronger than any of us, and finer in many ways; but she lacks tenderness--or is it merely imagination? She is riding a single virtue, the new gallantry, too hard--perhaps to self-destruction. Who knows? He felt that he had come suddenly to the brink of a precipice; and he could not see into the gulf that divided two hemispheres. Was it light there? Was it darkness? Was it another dawn? Or was it but a quite old ending masked as a new beginning?" (148-9)

Also, a quote when Asa goes to visit his beloved Kate, whom he dreams of leaving Lavinia for.

"'In a minute. I'll tell Martha.' She went into the house; and turning away, while Pat and Percy leaped and circled in front of him, he crossed the ragged lawn, beneath dappled shadows of elms, and stood waiting for Kate to come out. The river path, trailing across the meadows, was lost in billowing waves of asters, golden-rod, and life-ever-lasting. There was no wind, and the October sunshine, pouring down from the stainless blue of the sky, kindled the variegated bloom into a running flame, misted over with smoke-colored pollen. 'It can't last,' he thought. 'Time comes, time passes.' But what was time? An element or an illusion? Flow or duration? And how deep was the gulf that divided yesterday from today, or today from tomorrow? The scene was so breathless, so drowned in stillness, as if in a well of being that it seemed to him his pulses had ceased their vibration. Not only time but life itself was suspended. Nothing moved. Nothing passed. The drifting pollen, the bird on the flower, the bronzed leaves on the elms, the shadows asleep on the grass--all these things were as motionless as is the pause between the flow and ebb of a tide, or the breath between the thought and the spoken word...

Then, suddenly, movement stirred in the air above, and again the scene came to life. A straggling line of crows wavered in curves out of the sky, while below them, their shadows skimmed so close to the ground that the meadows appeared to move and breathe with them in slow pulsations of light. Yes, it had to change, he said aloud to himself. Everything changes. Nothing is ever the same again." (187-188)

And then there is the point when Roy and her father are talking about Stanley for about the umpteenth time.

"'She's a broken thing, and she hasn't your courage.'

'Everybody keeps saying that.' She flushed angrily. 'It sounds as if the only good of courage is to make you pay for what other people can't--or won't--stand.'" (305)

And here Asa talks to himself after he gets angry with Lavinia.

'"Well, lie down, and I'll put on the coffee' He couldn't hurt her, that was his weakness. He couldn't bear hurting things. And yet, he knew, that only by hurting her could he defend his own sense of right, of justice, of inward integrity. Is it true, he asked himself wearily, turning away, that there comes a crisis in life when inhumanity alone can serve the ends of humanity? Is it imperative, at such moments, to reach not only beyond one's lower impulses, but even beyond one's better nature? Could a principle betray one as well as an appetite? He was too old to believe tha. Right was right, wrong was wrong, or his universe fell to pieces. I do not know where I am going, he thought. I cannot see a step before me; but I must go on." (399)

Much of the book is like this, with characters like Roy and Asa, struggling to have a life while people like Lavinia and Stanley, soul-suckers, consistently put obstacles in their way, that prevent them from having a happy life. At the end, even Craig gets confused and feels himself falling for Stanley once again. It is at this point that Roy runs off into the night, with plans to go to the ciy, but doesn't get very far. She ends up spending the night with a disfigured man, and realizes someone who is even lonelier than herself....

Ellen Glasgow's novel, made into a movie with powerhouses like Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland(Billie Burke, Glinda in The Wizard of Oz plays Lavinia), is largely forgotten in today's world. It is, however, a great book on family drama, something that is certainly, as stipulated in the Pulitzer requirement, an aspect of American life. Why it is forgotten, I'm not sure, except that it has had the fate of many other novels from that era, that just get lost. Though sometimes I thought that black people were portrayed in a little bit of a romantic kind of way, there was something about a young black man, despite the odds in the South at that time, trying to climb his way out of his station. The fact that idealistically it doesn't work makes it almost all the more real...Worth the read? Yes.