Nebraska: Plains Song by Wright Morris

Again I feel like I have been lead astray by book sellers' summaries of an author's prestigious awards: for Morris, two National Book awards, a Guggenheim and NEA fellowship, all honoring him between the late 50s and mid-80s. Where all those august panels that reviewed his work populated by men? Plains Song is the story of three generations of women. It clearly does not read as though it was written from first hand experience.

The women are stoic, silent and simple, traits that may have been desirable for a woman venturing into the plains to farm and live a hard, weather dependent life. But nothing happens in the story that shows any of their grit ... they have no challenges to best. Unlike Colette, the main character does nothing more strenuous than gather her eggs.

Cora, the first woman to head to Nebraska with her husband Emerson and his brother Orion, is aloof, self-sufficient and immediately estranged from her husband. Her child rearing responsibilities triple when she takes on the daughters of her sister in law who dies in childbirth. Emerson does little but daily farm chores, avoiding his house full of women who do not provide him with the hands he needs to be prosperous. Cora and her brood are about as interesting as her Leghorns.

The only woman in the family who dares leave Nebraska is Cora's sister in law Belle's daughter, Sharon, who heads to Chicago to study music. Her life there is portrayed equally flat and without memorable events or encounters. Morris writes best when describing Sharon on the train between home and Illinois: "she felt inexpressible relief ... the clang of the last crossing bell rang down the curtain on ceaseless humiliations, inadmissible longings, the perpetual chores and smouldering furies, the rites and kinship with half-conscious people so friendly and decent it shamed her to dislike them." The train whistle here lacks the image of comfort and knowledge of one's place that Gautreaux uses as his metaphor for T-Bub and Colette in our Louisiana selection.

When Sharon returns the final time for Cora's memorial, Nebraska isn't Nebraska anymore. Her niece shows her where the farm used to be. The family now grows soybeans with enormous house size harvesters. Her life seems as unbelievable as the exhibit of woolly mammoths they visit at the museum in Lincoln. Nothing and no one are worth remembering.

Morris intrudes into Sharon at the novel's end. The story has progressed to the late 70s and Sharon finds herself caught up accidentally in a convention of women libbers. It's as if Morris can't figure this out and he portrays the gathering as sort of an invasion. If this is his attempt to say the previous generations of Atkins women had it better by knowing their place in the drudgery and repetitiveness of small farm life, it fails to do so. And it makes him seem as passe and out of date as his tin-type depicted characters. But then again maybe in 1980 when the book was published it seemed apropos. Today it seems it should be in the exhibits at the Lincoln museum.

Finally, I must assess the book in its depiction of place. Because my mid-West geography is sparse, when Cora heads west and certain rivers or towns are mentioned, I had no idea where she was. In fact, until Lincoln was mentioned almost half way into the book, I was tempted to check our list to see which state I was reading about. Unlike Perrin's Vermont books which too are about farming, but producing things fairly unique to the state, the Atkins acreage could be almost anywhere in the early 20th century. Because the story lacks strong, economically productive men, the reader does not come away with a sense of accomplishment from the task. Morris creates characters who suffer for leaving Nebraska: Orion going off to WW1, Blanche to the school for "special" students in Chicago. But when they return home, they "fit in" to the mundane but without any indication of coming back more worldly or expanded from their travels.