Reviews for A death in the family

The average rating for A death in the family based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-13 00:00:00 Delbert Kershner Do you want to hear a joke? Too bad. I just read James Agee's A Death in the Family and it's so damn depressing that all I want to do is sit in a dark closet and tremble with existential angst. This is the kind of novel that makes me want to weep into my whiskey, but that would only tighten the spiral of depression. If you're going to take anything while reading this book, it should certainly be cocaine.* *Do not take cocaine while reading this book. Or probably any other book. The best way to describe the deep melancholy here is to take the first ten minutes of Up, multiply that by ten million, and then have a soccer player kick you in the groin. It feels like that. Death is pervasive here. Even this novel's genesis is shrouded by the long sleep. Agee was just 45 when he died of a sudden heart attack. A Death in the Family was not yet complete. The editor David McDowell took the rough manuscript, shaped it into a piece of fiction, and published it to great acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize in 1958. This is important to mention because there is some controversy over the finished product. The version of A Death in the Family that I read is the Pulitzer-winning McDowell-produced work. A University of Tennessee professor named Michael Lofaro published a "Restored Author's Text" in 2007. Lofaro evidently reconstructed his more "authentic" version by removing the McDowell opening (a sort of prologue titled "Knoxville: 1915" that was actually a previously-published Agee story), putting the book back into pure chronological order (rather than McDowell's interspersed flashbacks), and adding chapters that McDowell removed. McDowell claimed that he hewed to Agee's original manuscript with a few minor exceptions. He admittedly added the Knoxville: 1915 sequence as an opening, though it was not originally part of A Death in the Family. He also took several sequences that lay outside the manuscript's timeline and placed them - rather haphazardly - into the main timeline. These are the flashbacks that Lofaro dislikes so much. In the McDowell text, these flashbacks are set off in italics and are written in such a different style - hallucinatory, stream-of-conscious - that they might as well have been excised completely. I'm not too interested in the inside literary baseball. All I know is the version I read is the one that's come to us as an American classic. That's enough for me. Agee's book wouldn't be the first gem that's been polished to greatness by a talented editor. In short, I don't care how much McDowell mucked around with the manuscript; whatever he did worked. (Assuming his intent was to place me into a grand funk). Anyway, back to the sad stuff. As the title promises, this is a tightly focused (aside from the flashbacks), semi-autobiographical tale centered on the Follett family, and the death of its paterfamilias, Jay Follett. The story spans only a few days. It begins with Jay alive at home. He gets a call from his alcoholic brother, warning that their father is at death's (so much death!) door. He rushes to be at his father's side, and on the return trip, is killed in a single-car accident. Agee explores the loss of Jay through his wife, Mary (heavily reliant on her faith), his son (and Agee surrogate) Rufus, and daughter Catherine. There is also Joel and Catherine Lynch, Mary's mother and father (the father a deftly drawn skeptic), and Mary's Aunt Hannah (a pragmatic emotional support). Even peripheral characters like Jay's brother Ralph are given wonderfully humanizing touches, which is testament to Agee's ability to write skillfully but efficiently (the McDowell version is just 310 pages). Agee's prose is beautifully simple (with the exception of the overwritten-and-under-punctuated italicized sequences) and perceptive. For example, early on, there is this marvelous little scene where Mary cooks Jay breakfast shortly before his death. Agee notes such tiny, intimate details that I had the subtly uncomfortable feeling I was spying on these two characters. Much of the book is like this. There are no complex set pieces. There are no emotional fireworks. (There are also no literal fireworks, for you firework fans out there). This is a novel of small insights and observations. About death, in case I haven't made that abundantly clear. When fiction deals with grief, it usually does so in the way that fiction deals with everything: formulaically. Novels have certain rules. There are character arcs. There is rising action, a climax, and falling action. When books or movies deal with death, they usually follow a survivor who travels a cathartic road to redemption. That does not happen here. There is no plot to speak of, only a series of events occurring one after another over the course of a couple days. (Once again, the italicized flashbacks notwithstanding. If you haven't picked up on this yet, I'm not a fan). There is no grand moment when Mary or Rufus comes to some détente with death, and realizes that they're going to be okay. There is only loss, and grief, and the way the world stands suffocatingly still in its wake. Built into the narrative is a dialectic of faith verses reason. Mary is the believer. She immediately turns to prayer, and to God, as a source of the strength she needs to endure. Her father, Joel, is the secular humanist, who comes to her with pragmatic and practical advice. "[Y]ou're going to need every ounce of common sense you've got," he said. "Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption. You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come through it and that you will too. You'll bear it because there isn't any choice - except to go to pieces. Agee doesn't take a strong position on this age-old argument. Instead his position seems to be that the universe is so large and cold and indifferent that the presence of God doesn't even matter. That death is so powerful that we might as well be adrift in an empty cosmos. Like I said, this isn't the cheeriest of books. It was, in fact, the most troubling thing I read this Halloween season. A Death in the Family is a classic that I really wouldn't recommend to anyone. This doesn't make me an ostrich, willfully blind to inevitability. Death is a reality. Experienced by all. However, I'm not sure how much of life should be spent dwelling on it. It comes soon enough without a literary primer.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-08 00:00:00 Alejandro Roque An oldie (1938) but a goodie. This book is a poster child for truth in advertising: it is precisely what its title tells us. A young husband and father is taken in the prime of life. As the family gathers in the house before the funeral, we hear every comforting word, every sob. We hear the prayers with the priest; we pick up the scent of flowers; we hear the empty condolences. A grief-stricken toddler daughter is hiding under the bed. They start loading the hearse. In between these scenes we learn of the family squabbles: a Catholic woman in Tennessee who struggled to gain the acceptance of her husband's non-Catholic family. We get glimpses of that family: the deaf mother-in-law; the alcoholic younger brother; the spinster aunt. It's also a discussion of God interpreted by the young boy who has lost his father. He tries to interpret things through the contradictory and confusing things he hears from adults. - is He out there or not? Most of the story is told through the eyes of this young boy. The work is set in 1915, so we have hand-crank cars and horses. I read this book because the blurb said people talk about this book years after they have read it. I think that's a fair statement and good testimony for this book. Although Agee's most famous work is probably Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he won the 1958 Pulitzer (posthumously) for A Death. Agee led a typical Great Author life: he was a chain-smoking alcoholic who died at age 45 from a heart attack in a taxi on his way to a doctor's appointment. He had multiple children with multiple spouses. Photo of Agee, aged 28, from Wikipedia (Revised 3/4/2017)