Novels & Stories: The Magnificent Ambersons / Alice Adams / In the Arena: Stories of Political Life

by Booth Tarkington, Arthur William Brown (Illustrator), Thomas Mallon (Editor)

In his greatest fiction Booth Tarkington wrote about the fragility of status in America’s ruthlessly dynamic society with keen realism and striking psychological insight. Here in one volume, edited by novelist and critic Thomas Mallon, are Tarkington’s best and most enduring works, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams.

A popular and critical triumph in its day and the inspiration for Orson Welles’s classic 1942 film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) is a brilliant family saga and a powerful dramatization of the vast social changes that swept America during the Gilded Age and its aftermath. Having amassed a fortune in the financial panic of 1873, Major Amberson, the family patriarch, established a palatial estate, an ostentatious monument to stability and permanence, in a city modeled closely on Tarkington’s native Indianapolis. But with the advent of new fortunes built on new technologies, especially the automobile, the family’s stature is suddenly imperiled, and the Major’s grandson George Minafer, a spoiled child and an equally insufferable young man, undergoes a “come-upance” of tragicomic proportion.

The protagonist of Alice Adams (1921), which Tarkington called his “most actual and life-like work,” is one of the great heroines of American literature. Coming of age in a small midwestern town in the wake of World War I, Alice Adams is the emotional heart of her lower-middle-class family, torn between her mother’s driving social ambitions and her father’s good-natured apathy. When she catches the eye of a promising young gentleman, Alice tries to conceal the reality of her family’s straitened situation, leading her father to take a desperate act to ensure his daughter’s happiness. Relying on skills honed during his long career writing for the stage, Tarkington crafts unforgettably poignant scenes—a dance, a catastrophic dinner party—that dramatize the inner anguish of a complex and sensitive young woman who can see her prospects dwindling before her eyes

Complementing these novels is the story collection In the Arena: Tales from Political Life (1905), a work borne of Tarkington’s brief but, for him, seminal career as an Indiana state representative. President Theodore Roosevelt, author of the famous 1910 speech, “The Man in the Arena,” so admired these stories that he invited Tarkington to lunch at the White House. Introducing the collection, whose tales deal with immigration, corruption, and other political problems still very much with us, Tarkington makes a plea for active engagement by citizens, even or especially when our democratic institutions are less than perfect: “When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.”

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Collections

666 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2019

About the author

Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only four novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction/Novel more than once, along with William Faulkner, John Updike and Colson Whitehead. Although he is little read now, in the 1910s and 1920s he was considered America's greatest living author.

Reviews

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
Perfect! Exactly the type of novel I love most

This book is so extraordinary that Things Fall Apart after this –like in the Chinua Achebe masterpiece- there is little joy left, or so it seems.
I have already started reading The Late George Apley by John Marquand and it does not feel that good.
I guess this is only to be expected, since there is even a law in statistics that is called
- Regression to the mean
If I have reached such an extreme of blissfulness, elation with Alice Adams, it only makes sense to fall back towards a median.
Alice Adams is the heroine of this magnificent novel, which is probably on a par with The Magnificent Ambersons, by the same author.
The latter is included in the Modern Library of top 100 novels of the 20th century, whereas the former has won the Pulitzer Prize.
If I ask myself what the main message, moral or lesson would be acquired from the book it would come under
- Be yourself!
This is also one of the rules of happiness as discovered by various studies and by Alice Adams the hard way.
The intricacies of this splendid work are impossible to explain here and I can only tell you that they have fascinated me.
Take the heroine- she has many qualities, but a few shortcomings and some bad luck being born in a family without a high social status.
For some time, as a teenager, Alice had enjoyed the attention of quite a number of suitors, although she was too young to make any long term difference.
In fact, the problems started once the boys stopped coming and leaving her quite abandoned and without partners at dances.
At the dance where she meets Arthur Russell, nobody pays attention, except for a young man who is not interesting.
Arthur Russell though is excited as soon as he lays eyes on Alice and he immediately wants to meet and dance with the heroine.
There is a web of relationships, relations and supposed and false friendships, and above all there is a class difference that makes some scenarios impossible, for no other reason than birth right and ultimately- money.
Another conclusion we could from this chef d’oeuvre is that
- Money makes the world go round
It is more complicated, since positive psychology has studied the subject and the conclusion is that you cannot be happy as a pauper or homeless man, but once you have the means for a decent life, any additional sums add little to your wellbeing.
However, the situation is made worse by the fact that Alice has a defense mechanism that defeats its purpose in the end.
She tries to appear as a young woman of means and acts in a false way most of the time, in order to make people believe what she wants them, only to conclude later on that they believe what they want anyway.
Presenting this false image can be funny quite often, even if it is almost tragic- comic when she hangs on to an old lady at the dance to pretend that she is not really without a suitor, or when they hire a hilarious woman to be their waiter for a special soiree.
For a long time I felt that things would work out for Alice and had not anticipated how bad the climax would be for some people in the story.
Tal Ben Shahar, professor at Harvard has a few mots he keeps telling his students, as we can see on YouTube, where his extremely popular lectures are posted:
- Learn to fail, or fail to learn
This is one of the lessons from these lectures, but it is also a message we could get from the book, where the main characters adapt, it appears to situations which looked like “being against the wall” or at the end of the rope.
But we find that there is some more rope.
There is only fault I can find with this work is expressed at the beginning- it is hard to feel the same elation with the next book.

A masterpiece that gave me enormous pleasure and which is also meaningful and gives the reader food for thought

[Ann Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the novel "The Magnificent Ambersons". I'm saving "Alice Adams" and "In the Arena" for later. The Magnificent Ambersons is a minor gem of American literature. It is a wonderful character study of the Amberson grandson, George Minafer, a shallow and spoiled young man who eventually receives his "comeuppance". The novel is a naturalistic portrait of a particular time and place in American history and is a commentary on the peculiarities of the American character (and possibly America's version of capitalism). If you want to understand America, this book should be a part of your reading list. It gets only a 4-star rating because of a somewhat odd ending.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction T187b 2019