"Among O'Neill's most popular plays, Ah Wilderness! deserves a special place as the easiest for any amateur group to produce. Its characters and sets are conventional and it is over at a convenient hour. It has a happy ending."
My 1960s-era Modern Library copy (cast off from the Trenton (Michigan) High School library), was marked up with an actress's notes for the role of Essie, the mother of the family. The aroma of decades old cigarette smoke still emanates deliciously from the pages, which is entirely suitable and welcome to me, given the nature of this list and my motivations for taking it up in midlife, The play itself has a nostalgic aspect, being set on July 4th and 5th, 1906, and featuring young love as one of its main themes. The central family in the drama are a middle-aged husband and wife with six children (though only the younger four still live at home and feature in the play), who live in a spacious Victorian house in Connecticut (New London, most likely). Other than the circumstances that both the parents and children are about ten years further along than we are in age, and the father, who runs the local newspaper, is a man of substance and influence in the town, the situation bears a remarkable resemblance to my own family--indeed, they even share their surname with us. When I was sitting on my porch reading it in the languid last days of August I could almost feel as if I were in the scene, or that it was all taking place in the dining room just behind me. Doubtless all of this influenced my mood and opinion with regard to the play, which were positive.
One of the reasons I was eager to embark on this particular list was all of the American literature that is on it between the Civil War and World War II that was once famous and alive in the general culture (or at least the literate parts of it) that has been forgotten or ceased to be as important. I find that I like a lot of that stuff, and always have. If you subscribe at all to generational theory, Eugene O'Neill's place in the saeculum lines up almost identical to mine (in the theory, generations last approximately 20 years, and there are four generational archetypes; Eugene O'Neill was born 82 years before I was, into the Lost Generation, the last 'nomad' cohort). Generally I don't think of myself as having much in common with Eugene O'Neill, but he was about the same age as I am now when he wrote this, and it was similarly in the midst of a period of difficult economic times and major transitions in the social and economic bases of life. That is about the extent of my insight as to why he suddenly broke from form and wrote a mildly nostalgic comedy--the only such effort of his career--in his mid-40s.
Being Eugene O'Neill even in his light play there is an alcoholic character whose behavior and issues are extreme and disturbing by our standards, and there is a whole long scene set in a dive bar among tarts and tough talking Mickeys. He can never get away from that world entirely.
George M Cohan as Nat Miller in the original production of Ah Wilderness!
The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge
The magic words from this book brought up a deluge of recent best-sellers, which produced a high-scoring and competitive challenge with a (to me) surpise winner.
1. John Sandford--Field of Prey.......................................................................2,972
2. Harlen Coben--Six Years..............................................................................2,798
3. Dale Carnegie--How to Win Friends and Influence People.........................2,306
4. J.R. Ward--Lover at Last..............................................................................2,138
5. Cassandra Clare--Clockwork Princess.........................................................1,919
6. Rick Riordan--The Lost Hero.......................................................................1,833
7. John Grisham--The Confession....................................................................1,665
8. Joel C. Rosenberg--Damascus Countdown.................................................1,568
9. Garcia & Stohl--Beautiful Darkness............................................................1,334
10. James Dashnel--The Scorch Trials............................................................1,326
11. Keith Richards--Life.....................................................................................991
12. Michael Connolly--Reversal........................................................................863
13. David Nicholls--One Day............................................................................622
14. Michael Crichton & Richard Preston--Micro..............................................592
15. Clive Cussler--The Striker...........................................................................591
16. C.J. Box--Breaking Point............................................................................556
17. Becca Fitzpatrick--Crescendo.....................................................................468
18. Bella Andre--Always on my Mind...............................................................341
19. J.R. Ward--Crave........................................................................................249
20. James Rollins--The Sixth Extinction..........................................................169
21. Tracie Peterson--A Sensible Arrangement.................................................140
22. Nicole Krauss--Great House......................................................................137
23. Peggy Hesketh--Telling the Bees................................................................106
24. Chris D'Lacey--Icefire................................................................................102
25. Snyder/Albuquerque/King--American Vampire, Vol. 1...............................88
26. Raymond Khoury--The Templar Salvation..................................................81
27. Wanda Brunstetter--The Healing Quilt........................................................76
28. Ned Beauman--The Teleportation Accident.................................................68
29. Kermit Lynch--Adventures on the Wine Route.............................................44
30. Rae Mariz--Unidentified...............................................................................43
31. Canfield & Hendricks--You've Got to Read This Book................................39
32. George Gissing--The Odd Women................................................................29
33. Sara Yogev--Couples' Guide to Happy Retirement......................................25
34. Emily Eden--The Semi-Detached Couple & The Semi-Detached House.......4
(tie) Elizabeth Taylor--At Mrs Lippincott's..........................................................4
36. Enid Bagnold--The Squire..............................................................................3
37. Rose Macaulay--Non-Combatants & Others..................................................1
38. Erle Stanley Gardner--Case of the Curious Spinster......................................0
(tie) A.E.W. Mason--Dilemmas............................................................................0
(tie) Patricia Lee McComber--Love Lost..............................................................0
The winner is a thriller, another murder book set in the midwest. I don't want to read it. All these murder books strike me as being the same after a while. Maybe it has literary qualities: the author was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner as a journalist before becoming an author of thrillers. If nothing else, I suppose I could learn more about professionalism and the qualities it takes to ascend to that class by reading him. But then again, if I haven't grasped the tenets of professionalism in work by this point of my life, it seems unlikely I will ever be able to do so. My library owns three copies of Field of Prey, but they are all currently checked out, so I might be able to skirt it.
There are a number of books I would have read on this list if they had won. I would have read the Dale Carnegie, probably the Keith Richards. I definitely would have read the Nicole Krauss book (isn't she one of those contemporary with-it Brooklyn literary people?), the old writers at the bottom, Gissing and Bagnold and Eden and Taylor and Gardner. But they didn't win, and I must move on with the master list.
No comments:
Post a Comment