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The Incredible Year
Coney Island and Park Avenue show Julie from the North Woods a new kind of life....
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1929
8 people want to read
About the author
Faith Baldwin
177 books33 followersFaith Baldwin attended private academies and finishing schools, and in 1914-16 she lived in Dresden, Germany. She married Hugh H. Cuthrell in 1920, and the next year she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill. Although she often claimed she did not care for authorship, her steady stream of books belies that claim; over the next 56 years she published more than 85 books, more than 60 of them novels with such titles as Those Difficult Years (1925), The Office Wife (1930), Babs and Mary Lou (1931), District Nurse (1932), Manhattan Nights (1937), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Her last completed novel, Adam's Eden, appeared in 1977.
Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.
Typically, a Faith Baldwin book presents a highly simplified version of life among the wealthy. No matter what the difficulties, honour and goodness triumph, and hero and heroine are united. Evil, depravity, poverty, and sex found no place in her work, which she explicitly intended for the housewife and the working girl. The popularity of her writing was enormous. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, she published five novels in magazine serial form and three earlier serials in volume form and saw four of her works made into motion pictures, for an income that year in excess of $315,000. She also wrote innumerable stories, articles, and newspaper columns, no less ephemeral than the novels.
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October 19, 2015
A surprisingly good read. On the surface it is a romantic comedy of errors, but at the same time Baldwin is able to critique the various players and posers in 1920s "high society." Julie is raised to be fiercely independent by her father but unaware of the ways of the outside world. After her father passes away, she discovers that he has arranged for her to live with two New York City residents who are experienced in the world but aren't quite as swept away by it as some of the other characters she meets. The story covers the duration of that "incredible year" in which she encounters a wide variety of characters and is confronted with a new world of social conventions and modern trivialities. A person can't live in that environment without being affected by them at least a little bit, and Julie is forced (for the first time) to struggle with who she wants to be and who she wants to share her life with (for the first time there are other people around).
This is a great companion book to "The Great Gatsby" (both novels critique the excesses of the roaring 20s and were both published BEFORE the Stock Market Crash of 1929). Julie - like the modern reader - almost can't believe that characters like Jack, Hildreth and Pat Jordan can exist as real people who bet money they don't have on "sure things" in the stock market and are always scrambling to get enough cash together to make sure they are seen at the right parties kissing the right people drinking the right drinks and smoking the right cigarettes. But when things go bust, it might be Julie's strong core that keeps the bottom from falling out for the gang. The only other character who can come close to matching Julie's contempt for the superficial excess is Bruce Stepney, a designer of airplane engines, but as Julie grows more comfortable in the roar of the decade, will the incredible year pull them together or apart?
There is a lot more going on in this book than the marketing would have had me believe: a spectrum of female characters who are strong in very different ways; an examination of modernity vs less faddish ways of life; city vs. country; the role of money in identity formation; a comparison of what the author seems to believe are legitimate ways of making money such as logging and airplane engine design vs. Wall Street prospecting. Baldwin avoids taking on the political issues directly, but there are scenes where Julie's father crushes an attempt to unionize his logging camps (by punching the rabble-rouser) and in a lot of ways Julie and Stepney align with Rand's notion of the superior individuals who must not be dragged down by the masses. While the characters represent various degrees of various views, Baldwin doesn't let it become preachy or rise to the level of abstract symbolism - instead she lets the narrative drive the story in a way that lets the reader project their own views (as I did above) or dig in as deep as they want. Many research papers could be written about this book using any of the major critical lenses (Feminist, Marxist, etc.), but it always remains a love story at its center. This book is very much a product of its time - a time that was changing faster than the people living in it could process it - which also makes it relevant today.
This review is of a third printing from 1929.
This is a great companion book to "The Great Gatsby" (both novels critique the excesses of the roaring 20s and were both published BEFORE the Stock Market Crash of 1929). Julie - like the modern reader - almost can't believe that characters like Jack, Hildreth and Pat Jordan can exist as real people who bet money they don't have on "sure things" in the stock market and are always scrambling to get enough cash together to make sure they are seen at the right parties kissing the right people drinking the right drinks and smoking the right cigarettes. But when things go bust, it might be Julie's strong core that keeps the bottom from falling out for the gang. The only other character who can come close to matching Julie's contempt for the superficial excess is Bruce Stepney, a designer of airplane engines, but as Julie grows more comfortable in the roar of the decade, will the incredible year pull them together or apart?
There is a lot more going on in this book than the marketing would have had me believe: a spectrum of female characters who are strong in very different ways; an examination of modernity vs less faddish ways of life; city vs. country; the role of money in identity formation; a comparison of what the author seems to believe are legitimate ways of making money such as logging and airplane engine design vs. Wall Street prospecting. Baldwin avoids taking on the political issues directly, but there are scenes where Julie's father crushes an attempt to unionize his logging camps (by punching the rabble-rouser) and in a lot of ways Julie and Stepney align with Rand's notion of the superior individuals who must not be dragged down by the masses. While the characters represent various degrees of various views, Baldwin doesn't let it become preachy or rise to the level of abstract symbolism - instead she lets the narrative drive the story in a way that lets the reader project their own views (as I did above) or dig in as deep as they want. Many research papers could be written about this book using any of the major critical lenses (Feminist, Marxist, etc.), but it always remains a love story at its center. This book is very much a product of its time - a time that was changing faster than the people living in it could process it - which also makes it relevant today.
This review is of a third printing from 1929.
Displaying 1 of 1 review