Bonfire

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Clean copy, no dustjacket.

Genres: Fiction

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Also wrote under the name Dorothy Canfield.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (February 17, 1879 – November 9, 1958) was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. She strongly supported women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the ten most influential women in the United States. In addition to bringing the Montessori method of child-rearing to the U.S., she presided over the country's first adult education program and shaped literary tastes by serving as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee from 1925 to 1951.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long and engrossing novel from 1933 about the people of a small town in Vermont. The main character, Anna Craft, is a district nurse, a local woman, deeply entrenched in her community and its ways, and deeply absorbed by the usefulness of her work. In an early scene, she drives on her rounds through a strand of burnt pine trees -- a brush-clearing fire having gotten out of hand, the loss of the timber meaning catastrophe to the farmer and his wife, who'd counted on the sale of the wood to pay for the education of their children. A well meaning action on Anna's part (that actually has nothing to do with these minor characters) triggers a chain of events no one could've foreseen, and as the story slowly -- and this slowness is a good thing if you're enjoying the book as I was -- unfolds over the next few years, it becomes clear that we're witnessing a figurative fire burning through the lives of many in the town. Anna's brother Anson, a freshly minted doctor, scornful of the pokey ways of the rural practice to which he has come, ends up being the one most scarred. However, just as the burned pine forest becomes a place of sunshine and prodigiously fruitful berry brambles, there are quiet rewards for many. The metaphor of the bonfire is, fortunately, not hammered home -- at her best Dorothy Canfield has an oblique way of telling a story that makes you want to hug yourself. At her worst she can unexpectedly plunge her characters into unconvincing melodrama -- there's a bit of that here, and the middle section, mostly about Anson, took a good bit of the savor out of the book for me. I liked the quieter sections, in which we slowly get to know the characters and their foibles through the workaday details of their lives, far better. Canfield was a great believer in social justice, as is her main character Anna (a well-to-do conservative citizen reflects that he will nip a plan of hers for improving educational opportunities for backwoods children in the bud at the town meeting by calling it "socialism"). However, this book reveals that while Canfield was quite progressive and open-minded for her time, her blind spot is her attitude towards Indians. It's hard to tell if she means it literally when she refers to people up in the mountains, eking out sustenance hunting and berrying, living lives made ugly by ignorance and poverty, and scorned by those in the village as "shiftless," as "Indians", or if she's just using the word as a description of their lifestyle. If the latter: boo. If the former, she could well be giving us an accurate picture of the times, but apparently without realizing that she's showing just as much prejudice as the smuggest denizen of Main Street. That one reservation aside, this is a book I really lived in, and one which I could imagine revisiting after it's had a chance to lie fallow for a decade or two.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weirdly liked, despite its stiff characterizations and its very, very bad girl who of course, comes from the other side of the tracks. Sex and golddigging and godliness and rectitude.

[Jay Callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the great novels of the 20th century, and is very hard top encompass in a description here. Many novels display careful planning and author's skill, but that is mostly all. The are dead artifacts. This book has heart and intelligence, and almost seems to have come into being independent of an author. It is that rich.

Apparently the story of two years in the life of a brother and sister in a Vermont village, the story expands to include a whole host of others, and by the end, is the story of a whole community of people facing the essential challenges of life. One of the book's "messages" is, I think, that it is possible to live well (and I don't mean "comfortably") in the world, in a place, in community, but that demands love, common sense and courage.

In the end, some people pass through, not to transcendence, but to true life, while others have been wounded in ways that may be hard to overcome. No facile, dishonest, cheeriness here, but an honest report from a woman who had lived a long engaged life. The book sums up/ends in a triumphant unforgettable image of the community dance/procession and of light, all illuminated and commented on by a kind of laconic Vermont chorus (like in an ancient Greek play).

(By the way, the only way I can see that someone could find anything "eugenicist" in the book is if they think in slogans and already knew what they were going to say in a review before reading the book.

Fisher commented in a letter to the publisher that Lixlee is not "bad" because she's from the wrong side of the tracks, but because, growing up in predatory chaos and without a family, she had to develop techniques to protect herself: techniques she then could not escape from. The rich man Stewart was exactly the same.)