Boston Adventure: A Library of America eBook Classic

by Jean Stafford, Kathryn Davis (Editor)

Twenty-nine-year-old Jean Stafford made a bold entrance onto the American literary scene in 1944 when her first novel Boston Adventure became a surprise best seller, its style inviting comparisons to James and Proust. Sonia Marburg, the protagonist of Boston Adventure, grows up in the North Shore village of Chichester, the daughter of an angry marriage between immigrant parents who remain outsiders in America. Seeking to escape the material and spiritual impoverishment of her childhood, Sonia looks across the bay at the State House dome in Boston for the promise of a richer life. Her dreams seem to find fulfillment when she finds a position assecretary-companion to Miss Lucy Pride, a summer guest at the hotel where Sonia cleans rooms, and moves into her Beacon Hill home. Boston Adventureis a perceptive satire of upper-class Boston society and a quicksilver portrait of a young woman trying to navigate a singular transit between very different worlds.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Modern Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels

512 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, finally, I have finished this book! I see it took me 10 days to read, it felt more like 10 weeks. About twice as long as it needed to be, and more like a Victorian novel than one set in the 1930's, it was saved for me by the incredible prose, and the only reason I continued to read. Now on to something shorter and lighter.

[Mary Cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. A dense and fascinating novel of 1930's Boston society from an impoverished young girl's point of view. Loved the writing, the wit, the insights, and more.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though this took me almost a month to read, I really loved it. Great characters, great view into a certain weird slice of 20's-40's New England life.

[Dan Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm afraid I don't quite have the time (or the talent, ha ha) to write a proper review right now, but I loved this book, which is almost two different but related novels: Book One: a young girl's somewhat Dickensian childhood and adolescence in a shabby town across the harbor from Boston; Book Two: her life after she is taken in hand to be the secretary of a hilarious rich old Boston spinster. Very little plot, but much observation and humor. Amazing that Stafford produced this very rich, very long novel at the age of 29, and just as amazing that such an uncompromising and "literary" work was a bestseller in 1944...

[Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm so glad to have finally read this. I bought it at a used bookstore years ago, and I kept meaning to tackle it, but never did.

This is one of those books that as I look back on it, there doesn't seem to have been enough plot to fill 500+ pages. And yet somehow it did. Overall, quite a fascinating, if slow-paced book. Sonie Marburg is a notable protagonist: brave, intelligent, foolish, and insecure. I am curious to know what happened to her in the future, since her narration did seem to come from a wiser version of herself. I feel through these honest side-observations it is implied that Miss Sonie finds future happiness, away from those who have trapped her. 3.5 stars. I found it quite hard to focus on this book at times, but otherwise enjoyed the writing.

[Vivian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a terrific slog. I’ve loved Stafford’s short stories, but this novel could’ve easily been about 150 pp. shorter. There are glimpses of her incisive style, and the characters are very interesting, but it’s a definite boondoggle at times.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Jed Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite as strange and moving as THE MOUNTAIN LION, but certainly more ambitious and successful than THE CATHERINE WHEEL, this reads very much like a first novel by a soon-to-be-great writer. In part a semi-successful experiment in melding James with Proust, the novel's best moments are its most uncanny, pointing the way towards the disturbing and elusive approach taken in Stafford's best short stories.

[Hermes Kingsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a feel good, easy read, but instantly and thoroughly engrossing. Each character is viewed from multiple angles. Stafford is uniquely insightful. Here, she displays a vast array of preWWII (pre-Depression!) American attitudes around each group of European immigrant, race, class, communism, fascism, Hitler, Roosevelt, Franco, Mussolini... She wrote in the mid 40s to describe 1920s Boston society and so much more. Nothing seems left out and though many of the references toward history (Vanzetti comes up, for example) are quick, they are never cheap. Stafford chooses every line judiciously so that this not terribly long novel is jammed packed with internal and external dilemmas and revolutions. I appreciate the consistency of her treatment of each character. None change their core character, though huge shifts in circumstance create riveting drama. I’ll find another of hers to read, though a moment away from the fraught mental insights of the author is necessary first.

[Justin Tanner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really marvelous book full of surprises. Harrowing, heartbreaking and utterly unsentimental. The lead heroine is one of the greats. However the style tends to be florid and by the end of the book I was exhausted by the lengthy wordiness just when the narrative needed a tighter rein. Worth the time if you like 539 page novels, which I do.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed bits of this novel. I was interested in the characters in the beginning, and was hoping and hoping that the narrator and main character would develop and we could see her personality. We suffer with her through tragedy, poverty, humiliation… and finally she has some opportunities to meet society and people her age and create a new life…but she just is so negative about every new character she meets. The long analysis of these minor characters and their flaws make her seem so petty and judgmental. Her personality never really comes through. I would have loved a lot more of Sonie’s dialogue but we just get her criticisms of everyone else. This novel really drags, and I feel Stafford was desperate to create a “Henry Jamesian” work. It feels contrived ( a nineteen year old with the thoughts and commentary of a 40 yr old) and the worst was the 50 pages devoted to her first tea party!!! 50 pages! A slog…and an unnecessarily depressing plot ending… Probably a 2.5 star rating.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderfully strange book. I particularly liked this explanation of it. https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/lite... I found the authorial voice a bit off-putting in the intermediate section of the book. Not yet an adult, certainly not elite class, the narrator's musings don't match her class status, experience, or age. But I found the essay above helpful in considering this. Loved her mean jabs at the Boston Brahmins, her class longings, the limits of class rise. So many loose ends--particularly in regards to romance--also interesting. Definitely an interesting read.

[Robert Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intially I thought it was just me being a slow deliberate reader; it took me almost 40 days to finish 489 pages. Boston Adventure, when you peel it down is a fairly simple story , with superb insights into Boston culture, politics, prejudices,romance circa the late 1930's. The language is dense and winding and on occassion exhausting. The end of the novel seems rushed and/or incomplete.The book was a runaway best seller in 1944 and hats off to the reading public back in the day.I'm equally glad I read it and finished it.

[Erica Hersh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wouldn’t normally pick up this book, but a friend recommended it (and gave me a copy), so I figured why not? Overall I liked it more than I thought I would - it was richly detailed, with an interesting main character and an unusual journey. But in many places, it was as mannered as some of the characters, which just isn’t my thing, and it could have been about 40 pages shorter.

[Marcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmmm. I read this in small increments, it didn’t capture my attention well. I don’t know whether it was the fairly depressive tone or the writing style, maybe both. I will try other stories by this author, but I didn’t like this one.

[Grace Hoffmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Complete torture. Extremely long, dated, nothing happens. Good for historical account of Boston, I guess, which is why I read it. Can't remember why I picked it up, maybe because of Maureen Corrigan? Can't imagine many people getting thru it (500 pages)

[R Mc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes hard to pick up... hard to put down once you get going....

Stafford’s prose is natural and deep. Open the book, and witness Sonia Marburg come to be through her own tragedy, romance, and labour....

A very long and dense story about the assembly, demolition, and renovation of values....

[Daniel Polansky]

The daughter of impoverished insane provincial parents discovers the stultifying madness of Boston high-society. Stafford is very smart and very mean and can’t stop being either for the span of a paragraph and it kind of steps on the narrative.

[Debra Moniz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the 1940’s about a poor girl who is invited to move to uppercrust Boston as a personal secretary. The novel presents a very slyly funny skewering of Boston blue bloods but also is a tad bizarre at times. Lots of old timey slang which was fun to learn.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange little novel. A fun intimate picture of 30s and 40s New England that starts off as one thing and then becomes kind of a James-Ian picture of high society teas and lounges and then just… abruptly ends! Stafford was like “I’m done here!”

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, plot like molasses.

[Bob Peru · Rating 3 out of 5]

tedious at times. jamesian and whartonesque.
i hesitated between 3 and 4.
3.5.
‘the mountain lion’ is better.
and her stories are superb.

[Kate K]

The main character here is so great. Singlehandedly cured my instinctive distrust of people from New England but also kind of confirmed it. We can live so many lives in such a short period.

[Courtney Blackledge]

This was a hard one to rate. I wouldn’t recommend this to many people but I’m glad I found it in
Boston and I’m glad I read it. It is a commitment to be sure- like many people have said it is little plot but a lot of reflection, comparison, and analysis of people. It was really slow to get into and ends in a less than satisfying way but I did think a lot while I read and I appreciate a book that makes me do that.

Thoughts while reading:
-Her mother makes me sad for people who are imprisoned by their own minds.
-I relate to the feeling of having your face pressed up against the glass of the world you can’t be a part of.
-The references about racisms towards Jews makes me wonder about the time period. I didn’t realize how rampant anti-semitism was even in the states in that time period. Miss Pride agreeing with Hitler’s view on Jews blew my mind.
-On pg. 330 I liked her thoughts on the difference between memory and recollection. It really made me think deeply about these experiences myself.

Favorite quotes:
•“But my urgent indifference did not heal me.“
•“My father was not a man whose misery could be mitigated by a change in environment, or an increase of worldly goods or an establishment in a society.”
•“He stared at me, absorbing the words after the sound was gone.”

[Vel Veeter]

A very dense first novel by the writer Jean Stafford. Her next two novels will be relatively slim by comparison, and while I think this one should have been cut by about a 1/3 (I had some real fatigue by the end), it’s not bloated, but overly rich. It’s carefully and slowly wrought, and the background presented in the first section is very thoughtful and interesting, but by the time we get to the second half, it feels either somewhat immaterial to conclusion, or more interesting.

Sonia Marburg is the daughter of a German father and a Russian mother who on the boat the US after WWI. Sonia is born into their increasingly loveless home where the resentment and rage of two people who shared a powerful moment grow to hate each other. Her father resents giving up his class and profession and made to be a blue collar worker in the US and her mother is plagued by a kind of Russian wasting sickness. When her mother becomes pregnant with a second child when Sonie is around 10, her father bolts. That child becomes sick after a few years and Sonia’s reaction to her mother’s inertness leads to always want to bolt.

All that is simply the first half.

She’s sent to work for a rich family in Boston and is able to carve of a constant outsiderness to this family, never quite getting in, but also never quite getting afflicted with their own sickness.

Like I said, this is a long novel, over 500 pages, and it’s not really deserving of all those pages, but it is very good. It should not for one moment be understood that Stafford isn’t a masterful writer, but the novel collapses in upon it’s own weight by the end.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jean Stafford is #1 storyteller.

[Cheryl Crotty · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a bit slow and dated. Written in 1944. There were some interesting side stories though about that era. Now I must go and photograph Pinckney Street.

[Juliet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I preferred the first part of this much-overwritten book to the second. In the first section, Sonie is young & growing up in her chaotic home with her father who is a guilt-driven German alcoholic and her mother who is Russian and at once lazy and hysterical. They're also broke, of course. Sonie works in a resort-ish hotel visited mainly by elderly well-to-do folks and she is fascinated by a spinster, Miss Pride, for all the things she is that her parents are not: organized, neat, proper, very secure in her sense of self, and financially comfortable. Sonie's days move between the world of cleaning Miss Pride's room and going home to chaos at night. It's rather bleak as one horrible thing after another happens, but the characterization is rich and something about it kept pulling me through.

The second part of the book she does go to live with Miss Pride as her secretary so she is rescued from the privations and challenges of her childhood in Chichester. And the whole thing loses its oomph. The first thing that happens in this section is she attends a tea party which goes on for 40 pages or something interminable like that. We are introduced to all these Boston society people, and I kept wondering why I should care. This part of the book winds up being about Miss Pride's niece, Hopestill (wtf?), and the man who is entranced by her, the doctor. Sonie sort of likes the doctor, then decides she doesn't, so there isn't even really a love triangle there. She did like a guy she knew when she was young, Nathan, but he is so unpleasant to her and is in love with some ridiculous Japanese woman instead, I had very little interest in him at all. She's not really involved in anything or with anyone. Though she does wind up putting her mother in an insane asylum, and the parts that deal with her mother are the most compelling in this section but they are few & far between. For the Boston bits, I think maybe Sonie was intended to be an observer/narrator like Nick in Gatsby, but Stafford did not pull that off at all. The writing gets more & more turgid and forced, analogies go on for half a page and they're not even that helpful, and it just got harder and harder to keep reading and the only reason I finished was because I had gone through all of that and I didn't want to give up. But I would say to others, read the first part and once she gets to Boston, know that things work out OK, and call that the end and put the book down.

Oh, and in the second part, there are also little spikes of nastiness where people say things like Hitler has the right idea about the Jews. So, yeah. Many reasons why this book hasn't withstood the test of time.