Booth Tarkington

The Magnificent Ambersons -- Booth Tarkington's portrait of the American midwest at the turn of the twentieth century -- is just that: magnificent. I have to say, I can't remember the last novel I read that felt so complete, that contained equal measures of humor and profundity. 

Ambersons is a novel in the tradition of The Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham, William Dean Howells's later nineteenth century account of one family's ascent -- followed by its decline. But Tarkington's book, I think, is more lasting: first, as I say, because it includes an effective degree of humor; and second, because it feels decidedly more modern. Ambersons takes us from the Civil War, to industrialism, and eventually to urbanism. The family which climbed the ladder, and which established itself in the 1870s, is different from the one which fell from that same ladder in the years before the First World War. 

All of that said, there's a considerable space between Tarkington and Fitzgerald, say: the former is most certainly a product of the nineteenth century, and his prose, despite its ease, seems only recently to have been freed from the formality of that time. Tarkington's content, too, is of the later nineteenth century: automobiles, for instance, are regarded as the Internet was in 1990: something shiny and sinister, something with the potential to overwhelm. And overwhelm, of course, it does: the Amberson family is replaced by a revolution in economics, in development, and, most importantly, in technology. The landed aristocracy is no more. 

When Eugene Morgan -- one of the novel's secondary characters -- communes with the ghost of his lost love, Isabel Amberson, he does so on behalf of a generation: he reaches back in time using telepathy and emotion. How quaint, Tarkington seems to imply: how powerless against the automobile. That scene -- of remembrance, but also of resolution -- is quite poignant: it's the end of one era, and the beginning of another. Tarkington presents it perfectly, and the result is a novel positioned just on the edge of modernity: just on the cusp of that shift in both life and literature.