The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty (Mississippi)

I've looked all over the Internet for book club discussion questions or other reviews to try to spark something incisive for me to write about this Pulitzer Prize winning book. What am I missing? Have I overdosed too early on small Southern town literature?

Laurel, a widowed artist who lives in Chicago, returns to her Mississippi home town to deal with the illness and subsequent death of her widowed, but remarried, father. Laurel, while comforted by her neighbors, townsfolk, and the unforgettable "bridesmaids," seems completely disconnected from Mount Salus as a real place. Her memories of her parents are reconstructed to childhood ideals. Her father's "lapse" in marrying brash, self-centered Fay is unexplained, personifying Ms Welty's theme that it's hard enough to know yourself, let alone your parents.

Maybe it's working in the health "industry," but it seems to me nostalgic to recall how relaxed surgeries and hospital stays were in the late 60s. No one, family or physicians, seem distressed or any way emotionally engaged in preventing the death of Laurel's father, or as she remembers it, her mother.

The cadence of Mississippi is expressed in the physical movement of the characters rather than their way of speaking. The description of the wake at home and certain aspects of her house are quaint and universal, if not uniquely Southern. My favorite section is:

"Miss Adele lifted the stacked clean dishes off the kitchen table and carried them into the dining room and put them away in their right places on the shelves of the china closet. She arranged the turkey platter to stand in its groove at the back of the gravy bowl. She put the glasses in, and restored the little wine glasses to their ring around the decanter, with its mended glass stopper still intact. She shut the shivering glass door gently, so as not to rock the old top-heavy cabinet."

What a generational gap closing couple of lines! How often have I done the same mundane household, mindless things -- for my mother as a child and now struggling with my own cabinet. More than any other passage, this says how ingrained female, almost compulsive behaviors, are passed through generations.

Fay, the counterpoint to Laurel, is my first character to align closely with another book I'm reading beyond the resolution list, The Culture of Narcissism. Hardly a full sentence passes from Fay's lips that is not focused on how she is wrongly affected by her husband's health, death and home town. She is pathologically self-involved; however, attributing this demeanor to her upbringing does not seem fully explored by Welty, as Fay's Texan family are merely "off the shelf," negative stereotypes.

So again, what am I missing? I am not convinced at the end of the story that either Laurel or Fay have changed their life views. Laurel does not lay off and smack Fay ... she is still the epitome of Southern gentlewomanly behavior. She is completely alone, no parent, no spouse, no pledge to connect with someone upon returning north to offset her resolve to not go home again.

Comment from MG: I did get back into the website and read your comments on Eudora Welty. Since I've read NO Southern Lit I should read The Optimists Daughter and let you know what I think. I was intrigued by her not because I've read her fiction but her biography is really nice, as I recall. When I was in my mid twenties I too went on a biography kick and hers stood out as particularly interesting.