The Field of Vision

by Wright Morris

Winner of the National Book Award "Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work --which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves--Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time."--John W. Aldridge One of America's most distinguished authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction

251 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
Morris won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision in 1956. His final novel, Plains Song won the American Book Award in 1981.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

That Wright Morris overcame his name being backwards should be reason enough alone to anoint this novel with five of my holy kisses. But no—overachiever Morris (Wright) further manages to reframe and skewer Hemingway’s entire macho bullfight bullshit, as actuality and conceptual node of Dude Think, by recasting masculinity as a performative farce failed at through four of its five revolving principal characters. Why, yes, the fifth is a woman; thank you very much for noticing.

Awesomely, another is a young child running around la plaza de toros wearing a fucking Davy Crockett costume (toy six-shooters and Napoleonic complex included), zapping everyone from little vatos locos and Injuns to his own dementia-riddled octogenarian great-grandpappy into their rightful graves of white, Old West restorative justice. Of course the coonskin cap is being rocked—by both child and said octogenarian. These are just two of the male failures to (ever) launch, my favorite being a one-time peer of Freud turned ex-pat Middle European shrink-quack that goes nowhere without his star patient Lois, a living, breathing Real Doll that doubles as his platonic domestic partner; the fucking with Lois' gender here is as dark as what happened to the bellboy in the elevator (I'm trying to get you to read it, come on). As a tragedian, Morris (er, Wright) knew the necessity of the absurd for the form to transcend, and he kills it deader than a poor, goddamn terrified bull. This is what happens when the real Midwest goes to Mexico, and it’s as gloriously droll and surreal as Ciudad de México dust blowing through downtown Omaha.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Plains Song by Wright Morris. Cora from that novel is one of the strongest characters I have read and very memorable. So the idea of reading another one of Wright Morris’ novels, even if it was rated quite low on Goodreads, was attractive.

The Field of Vision won the National Book Award in 1957. Its structure is intriguing in that the chapters alternate across five characters with each chapter being written from a character’s point of view, reflecting that character’s personality and internal thought process. Four of the five characters grew up and live in Nebraska. The novel takes place in Mexico, on a single day, at a bull fight. Two groups, traveling separately, encounter each other in Mexico, and go to the bullfight together. The day brings back memories of the incidents that have shaped their lives.

I found parts of The Field of Vision very readable, very enjoyable; the narrative the dry, almost emotionless style I remember of Wright Morris. There were sections though where I struggled, which didn’t seem to add to the plot or the development of the characters. None of the characters were likeable or admirable. You did get a sense, however, of individuals who had lost their way early in life and thereafter never found a new path. These characters seem to lack the courage to find or seek out some value in their lives.

While this novel was a mixed bag for me, it doesn’t offset that very memorable experience reading Plains Song. I will eventually read something else by Wright Morris to determine just how much I like his work.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

A character based novel set at a bullfight in Mexico. A group of mostly middle aged people reflect on certain episodes in their younger days. The people are Walter McKee, schoolboy friend Gordon Boyd, Walter’s wife, Lois, Walter’s grandson Gordon, Walter’s father in law, Tom Scanlon who is now blind and deaf and was expected to die forty years ago. The McKee family by chance meet Boyd at a bullfight in Mexico. Also there are Dr. Lehmann, a German born psychoanalyst and his partner Laura Kahler. The novel is told via a number of flashbacks and introspections by the various characters.

Early key events of the characters include Boyd tearing off a pocket of a baseball star, unexpectedly giving Lois McKee her first kiss, and trying to walk on water when he couldn’t swim. These incidents are known and recalled by Walter McKee and Lois McKee.

A very satisfying read though there is not much of a plot.

This book was the 1957 National Book Award winner for fiction.

[M F · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wright Morris's The Field of Vision is a perfectly mediocre novel that somehow won a National Book Award. Unless you've exhausted Faulkner's oeuvre, though, or you're really starving for a novel (ostensibly) about the American Midwest, or your favourite English phrase is "that is," there's really no reason to read this one. It's got all of the pretensions of high modernism with none of the power or beauty: think Faulkner's abstraction mashed up with Hemingway's love of bullfights but with no sense of character or colour. There's also a vein of ridiculousness that's constantly undermining the novel's aesthetic goals (yes, Faulker's novels also walk this knife edge, but Faulkner's a far better writer than Morris). A typical passage reads like this:

"If anybody had told him he would live to see the day a grown man would stand up and squirt pop at someone--but of course, he didn't. Live to see the day, that is. He'd had sense enough to go blind before he lived to see something like that. But one thing he didn't have sense enough to do was just stay put. Where he belonged, that is. He hadn't had sense enough to live, then die, back in Lone Tree."

Why squirting pop, Wright? That's the thing that finally draws the man into engaging with the present? Of course, Morris makes clear that we're supposed to accept squirting pop at a bull as a heroic gesture on par with Boyd's other ones, like kissing McKee's wife before McKee himself had, or trying, and failing, to walk on water in a sand pit (yep, this happens, too--I guess I forgot to mention that both the bullfight and the novel itself are parables).

I can't, in good conscience, recommend that anybody read this book when there are so many great ones out there. If you're looking for something similar, start with Faulkner and Hemingway; even their worst are better than this. Then, go read Cormac McCarthy. Then, Sherwood Anderson. I'd even say go read Frank Norris (both The Octopus and McTeague are better than this one).

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written but incredibly boring. Narrated from the viewpoint of several different characters I could never find a central point or, really, a story.

[Bill Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This has to be the most boring bullfight in literature.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Morris’s three or four best novels, which means that it is among the best American novels of the 20th Century. Never destined for popularity, though, because Morris is always astringent and unsentimental, and many readers cringe from that.

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wright Morris was an incredible American writer, and this book, which brings together at a Mexican bullfight a bewildering cast of characters who seemingly have no connection to one another, proves it. It dates back to the days when the people who decided who should receive the National Book Award actually knew what they were doing, which is why they awarded it to this book in 1956.

[Paul Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I should have known, when the overview was not about the book, but the author. An academic who writes about writers (evidently can't come up with a story of his own), John W. Aldridge (who?), heralds Morris as "the most important novelist of the American middle generation". Gag.

The setting was great for a character development novel. Rather Hemingway inspired. The entire book takes place at a bullfight in Mexico. Chapters alternate, in series, between main characters: a middle aged couple Lois and Walter McKee, their childhood friend Gordon Boyd, the wife's father Scanlon, their son and grandson (both named after their childhood friend Gordon), a friend named Paula Kahler, and Paula's psychiatrist Dr. Lehmann. Each character has their demons which are exposed and developed. The writing, at times, is quite good: "He liked to be alone surrounded by others, solitary, that is, rather than lonely" and "Lehmann had recognized the type. The professional soldier of failure, waging the cold war within himself."

But that is what I was hoping for. What I got was a book that started off pretty good, and degraded into gobbledygook. Maybe if I read all of the chapters for each character as a separate sort of short story, I could make some sense of it. However, the tortured soul insights into the characters got so existential that I kept regretting the read, falling asleep, regretting the read, then falling asleep.

The only reason I didn't pitch the book is it's short length.

[Kenneth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I want to say that there’s a story, a heart somewhere deep in this story that almost, almost comes to light at the end; but reading this book was painful. I wanted to cry in frustration during the last twenty pages, just desperate for it to be done. If I weren’t making my way through the National Book Award winners, I’d never have made it past page thirty.

[Mike Zickar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Something about Ty Cobb's pocket

[Joshua Leach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkable, richly symbolic work. Better than Hemingway at finding symbolism in a bullfight

[Miriam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought the narrative got progressively weaker. At first, I could find differences between the various characters as the omniscient narrator takes turns on their views and experiences. McKee at the beginning is not particularly likable, but he's a recognizable fellow: a narrow-minded, small-town guy who finds derisive humor is everything different from him, except his friend Boyd, whom he worships. As time goes by, the characters lose their distinctness and it's more the narrator's voice as he ruminates on all sorts of things, using the characters just as jumping-off points.

If Scanlon found the trip out West to be so difficult and terrifying, why does he decide to live that moment over and over in his memory? He says that you have to go through hell to get to heaven, but his life nearly freezing to death with his feet in a stove and living in a town that never really became a town doesn't seem like heaven to me (or to him, really). Where did all his strength go?

I don't get Boyd, either. He's charismatic and daring and full of potential. But just potential, nothing actual to show for it. All that stuff about hitting bottom and failure being the new success just doesn't resonate with me. At a certain point, I found myself agreeing with McKee (!): quit talking about stuff and splitting hairs and just do something.

It's not the same for Boyd to throw young Gordon over the fence to retrieve his cap. I don't believe he's reproducing himself or his view by forcing someone else into it. That seems anti-thetical to Boyd's view that the people who are different stand out on their own.

As for the bullfighting/Mexico stuff: meh.

[Judy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The National Book Award winner for 1957 was a challenging read. The entire story, such as it is, takes place during a bullfight in Mexico. I have yet to read a bullfight story I liked. Most of the book consists of flashbacks concerning the people involved in the life of a man names McKee. For the entire first half of it, I was not completely sure who anyone was.

Each character is a variation on eccentricity and most of them live in Omaha, Nebraska, though off the beaten path of mainstream American life. Some of them have sparks of being gifted, whether as an artist or a frontiersman, except for McKee himself who is a dud trying to make sense of all these oddballs.

The bullfight and arena (the field of vision) are meant to be symbolic. The theme seemed to me to be something about the banality of America. Wright Morris claims that he wrote the book to show that "the range and nature of the plains imagination...contains elements that are peculiarly American...There, mirrored in the bullring, a group of touring plainsmen see, for the first time, the drama of their tangled lives."

I am grateful he explained that on the jacket flap because otherwise I would have missed it. I did not enjoy reading this book.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

1957 National Book Award winner. I liked it at first, but soon got tired of the frequent shifts of perspective and of one character's use of "bullfight as metaphor for his life." Blame Hemingway if you like, but using bullfights as a metaphor for anything strikes me as boring. Even though it was only 250 pages, it felt overlong.

[Sally Hessling · Rating 1 out of 5]

My friend and I decided to read books that were written in the 50's.
She picked this book, I would not have picked this one.
It won the NATIONAL BOOK award in 1957.
Entire book takes place at a bull fight in Mexico. Each person, 5-6 characters have a chapter and they keep rotating stories. Stories from their childhood, teens and adult life. I found this book boring and slow.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about transformation, the past and the present. I loved the structure and the prose.

[Catherine Lienhard]

The McKees at a bull fight in Mexico. The impact on the various lives of the protagonist. Young Jordon McKee is in his Davy Crockett hat and his great grandfather the old frontiersman. Boyd is the soliloquizer, squirting soda pop at the bull who loses.

(read 8/14/67)