Books for Prep | |
 - The Union Forever!I read this book when I was an undergraduate at Columbia College in the mid 1980's. I remember being absolutely captivated by the glamor of it all. Alone in my dorm room, surrounded by rich kids, feeling like a cockroach, I gobbled up the lush Italian setting, the boozing and the brawls, the colorful supporting cast of millionaires and movie stars and barefoot Italian beauties. The central conflict was a classic man to man battle like MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. The dashing charm of the corrupt boyish American millionaire, Mason Flagg, matched against the primitive male courage of Cass Kinsolving, the tough Southern Marine turned painter. Since I was a lowly "charity boy" (Financial Aid student) at Columbia (though mired in the urban squalor Manhattan's Upper West Side, surely the most smugly and primly elitest of all the so-called great American universities) the loneliness of the blue collar intellectual and the hypocrisies of the affluent American liberal had great resonance for me. There were so many times when I saw myself in Cass' shoes, smashing a big rock in the faces of smug, fake professors who spouted liberal catch phrases but clearly couldn't care less about the troubled REAL lives of their students. In those days Cass Kinsolving was my hero. My own decision to join the Marines (as an enlisted man, NOT an officer) shortly after graduating with a completely un-marketable and worthless BA in English literature was in large measure a response to the power of William Styron's art. Having said that, however, when I reread the book recently I was shocked at how my impressions had changed. Looking back now, I don't see Cass as a very heroic character at all. His self-pity and sentimentality are much more apparent to me now that I've lived nearly 45 years. I've supported myself the whole way, unlike Cass, who drinks and sponges to stay alive. And Mason, who was supposed to be fiendishly evil, in a profoundly disturbing way, now seems to me like nothing more than a one-dimensional villain of the Snidely Whiplash variety. He's yet another cowardly Yankee scalawag, and Cass finds "redemption" not by searching his own soul but by passing judgment on someone else. Conveniently, Mason is a coward, and conveniently, Cass is honor bound to kill a man he already hates for all the wrong reasons. Styron is clearly working off an ancient grudge when the cowardly Yankee turns and runs the minute the southern boy picks up a rock and gives the rebel yell. But in real life, Yankees don't always turn and run(see Pickett's Charge). More than that, a Southerner who is really looking for redemption has got to go beyond the old, soothing stereotypes of sniveling Yankee cowards and fearless southern chivalry. Styron blows his horn all through the novel about wanting to create great tragedy, to shatter materialism, offer redemption, and the like, but in the end he settles for cheap shots at safe targets, creating trite melodrama rather than seeking to ask tough questions. Personally, I think it was really Cass who killed Francesca -- because he was too drunk to get it up! Rating: - Part brilliant, mostly tediousThis novel has tremendous potential at being great until about half way through the story loses it's momentum and things turn into overextended psychological rants by Cass Kinsolving. This one was hard to get through, and the ending is anticlimactic. I started to wonder how much more superflous and prosiac the descriptions could be to convey a simple concept, and how many more times do they have to be repeated? Definitely not a good starting point for a Styron neophyte. It's as if the purpose of the sex and violence in the story is to keep you awake. Rating:  - complicated but worth itThis book is long dance, tortured, and brilliant. Descriptions of Italy, specifically Sambuco, make you feel is if you are there They sweep and enfold you into Italy's "warm and fragrant being." It is a complicated tale told between two different time periods. Until the last pages you don't really know what happened or "who did it," or how it happens. Characterization and writing are so clear and precise you know you are in the hands of a genius. Some of my favorite lines; "Cass rose to his feet, fever swept by the sun, storm hunted, amid the flood of ancient groaning seas." "A love affair, like some prodigy of plastic surgery, is flesh laid onto living to flesh and to break it up is to tear off great hunks and parts of yourself." "You know, if you could turn into tiny bits of--of feathers, every word said by all men, in just one year, to all women when the men were thinking of something else; when they were trying to be smooth and polite but when their minds are fixed on the single all compelling goal, you have enough hypocrisy to plug up the entire known universe with feathers." "I don't know, every time she gets the rag she gets positively moon-struck. It's the worst thing about women--that really screwed up plumbing of theirs. A big jumbo sewer flowing through the Garden of Eden." Rating:  - A Trip to Italy (Three Stars)Some readers may be interested to know that the setting of this novel -"Sambuco" - is actually Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast, until recently the home of Gore Vidal. The movie being filmed in the village was Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart. Cass Kinsovling's household seems to be in the ground floor of the old Caruso Belvedere. The atmosphere of this book is not unlike the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, another tale of Americans in Italy in the 1950's. For all of Styron's fine writing, this is something of a period piece. The moral crisis at the heart of the book - the "fantastic going to pot" of Americans in the post-war period - is not of much concern to anyone today. Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice are Styron's masterpieces. RIP. Rating: - For the Acquired Styron Taste..I love William Styron, I have read all his books, yet I would not recommend picking up "Set This House on Fire" unless you've read some of his other works first. It's lengthy-in certain cases, such as the voluminous number of pages devoted to Cass Kingsolving's abysmal drunkenness, to the point of excess-and at times seems aimless. The story is told from the point of view of a character who is relatively uninvolved in the rape, death, and depression that ensue. Some of the most interesting passages are those which give us glimpses into the main characters' pasts. Taken separately, many of these sections make for wonderful, lucid parts of a story. But, when interspersed with lengthy, often difficult, descriptions of dark emotion and personal despair, they can be a bit drowned out. On the up side, there are many passages that are delightful to read, and Styron's elegant prose doesn't fail to shine through. Definitely worth reading if you've read and enjoyed "Sophie's Choice" or "Lie Down in Darkness." Otherwise, you'll probably be overwhelmed by the density (both lengthwise and in terms of content) of this novel. In association with Amazon.com | |