Sometimes looking back over 2009, I feel like these 50+ books are falling like coins in one of those sorting machines that are now located in the front of the grocery store: more Native American stories, more period pieces, and dare I say, more slugs than I expected. I am sorely disappointed in The Magnificient Ambersons. This is the second Pulitzer Prize winner on the list that didn't seem that engaging to me.
Booth Tarkington won in 1919 and this is the story of a place and a family that respectively move from quaint town to industrial city, and from landed gentry to to manual labor and SROs. It focuses on George Amberson Minafer, a gilded age youth, who is a coddled bully growing up and a pompous effected snob as he matures. He haughtiness is amplified when the Morgans move back to town. Mr. Morgan is a former boyfriend of George's mother and Morgan's daughter becomes George's love interest. Both relationships are destroyed because of George's vanity.
Meanwhile, Tarkington has the town grow, prosper and get covered with soot. The Amberson's too set in their patrician ways cannot deign to participate in industrialization, except on the speculative investment end. You can predict their fall to ruin.
The story construction is detached, wry observation in the first part, moving to more critical portrayal of George as protagonist, and finally to a denouement that seems horribly contrived and jarring. You do not want to see George redeemed or Morgan forgiving. As written, TMA seems dated, a book appealing to an audience rushing into the Roaring Twenties but still believing in a happy, tidy ending.
There is no sense of Indiana per se, just another unnamed mid-Western town like the one in Babbitt. Tarkington is steeped in class rather than place as controlling his characters' motives and actions. Maybe I should have read Hoosiers.
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