Pity Is Not Enough

by Josephine Herbst

"I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else," Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that Herbst in fact succeeded at story-telling. In this novel Herbst draws loosely on her family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to link the advance of free market capitalism to the North's abandonment of its commitment to racial justice. The protagonists - Catherine Trexler and her brother Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandals - are ripped apart financially and psychologically by competing codes of domesticity, Southern manners, and capitalism. In her introduction to the book, Mary Ann Rasmussen argues that Herbst was unlike many other 1930s leftists in that she refused the "essentialist notions of gender difference that confounded radical men and women of her generation."

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1933

Reviews

[Micah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first of Josephine Herbst's novels that I have read. She was mentioned in an essay about Modernist literature I was reading, so I thought I would give her a read. While I am not exactly disappointed in this book, I am also not that enthusiastic about it, to be honest. The novel tells the story of a family's economic hardship during and after Reconstruction. It has a clear bias toward the working class (Hebst was a Communist), but the politics are relatively subtle until the end of the book, at which point the ravages of American capitalism are brought into clear relief. As a narrative, Pity Is not Enough is engaging, but it is very much a family drama, which is not my favorite genre. This is the first book in a trilogy, and I am not sure I (a thorough completionist) will read the others.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is possibly the most depressing book I've ever read.

Josephine Herbst is tagged as a "radical" novelist; she was a early communist, opposing capitalism and fascism. In this novel these themes did not seem as clear as her depiction of a neurotic family and one person's slide into mental illness. Family members themselves were small-time capitalists, always chasing after the next deal, inheriting, selling real estate, consulting lawyers, crossing the country in trains, the first generation up from poverty. I really got the sense of the times (from post Civil War through the 1880's) as truly in upheaval and social revolution. But this was crammed with details of the worries and activities of a very busy, worried family. Exhausting.

This is a very powerful author, but the book was difficult to finish.