Robert Penn Warren--All the King's Men (1946)

This was a real book, of the old school. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1946, the film version garnered the Oscar for best picture three years later, indicating that the story was seen in this country at least as one of the seminal works of the immediate postwar years. While there are a lot of things in and about this that I like I was really impressed with the beginning of the book, the first 100-150 pages or so. A lot of the books on this list, even when they are great literature, are books that are thought to hold some appeal for teenagers and lesser experienced readers. But the beginning of All the King's Men, I thought, was something even a real man might want to read. There were political machinations, graft, corruption, personal and sexual power and domination, the interaction of highly skilled professionals in various fields in various arenas where power, money and women are contended for.  As the book went on however (my edition had 464 pages), it took the course of being less and less constantly centered on Willie Stark, the Huey Long stand-in who was by far the most compelling character in the book, and more on the narrator, Jack Burden, who though a little more hard-bitten than the usual examples of the type, is more of a traditional writerly character. The amount of space devoted to recollecting his long and not especially eventful romantic history with his adolescent girlfriend I think was especially unfortunate. I don't mind a little of that sort of thing, especially when it can serve to set a certain nostalgic atmosphere or mood, but this went way beyond that. A lot of modern readers find fault as well with the fairly lengthy Cass Mastern interlude, which is about the journal and romantic intrigues of one of Burden's Civil War era relatives, but I actually liked it. Flashbacks to the Civil War in southern novels, especially of this period, where the connection was still so palpable and personal, are usually pretty interesting.

The style of this book, which is highly descriptive and tends somewhat towards what would now be considered the wordy side, is very reminiscent of much masculine American literary writing in that era from around the mid-30s to the mid-60s, which is what I largely grew up on, but which I had not revisited in some years. I can still re-adapt to the style fairly easily, though it takes a couple of paragraphs for me to get back in the particular frame of mind needed to consume information in this form. I bought my copy of the book at a library sale in 1986, and have been lugging it around all this time, though I had not read it until now. The title page says it is a first edition, though it had already long been re-bound in orange library binding (which I kind of love anyway, by the way). The pages were yellowed and the book looked and felt like an antique to me even at that time, though the novel itself would only have been forty years old.

I am trying to convey what I most like about this book, for it has some very fine and powerful qualities. Since I am not being paid to produce polished essays, I am going to try to list some things that come to my mind bullet-point style:

1. The parts about driving on the old, (though at the time of the book's setting, they were new) lonely highways through the rural country and small towns and even the modest cities of Louisiana, which seems to have been still very much a quasi-feudal place in 1930 are very evocative.

2. There is often a sinister sense in books set in the 1930s in places outside the direct cultural authority of New York, London, Paris, Hollywood, and certain kinds of windblown midwestern American towns, and the character of Willie Stark especially gives this book a little bit of that, as if there is something bad in this environment that would crush any weaker person and that cannot be avoided or escaped from even by a stronger one. All of the indoor scenes feel to me to be taking place under dim institutional lighting, and the outdoor ones to carry some aura of geographical oppression in them.

3. I would not have wanted to live there, but I admit to having a fascination for certain aspects and relics of the Old South, particularly the era from 1910-1950 or so. When I am in that part of the world as a tourist I find I experience a certain sensation, almost like a thrill of danger, if I come upon old building or monument or even a tree that appears to have been overlooked in the process of modernization and preserved something of the old sinister but also in a way organic and vital aura that is usually lacking in the modern landscape. This is certainly not a romantic impulse, and a lot of these instances evoke a sense of horror or repulsion in its associations, but there is an attraction to it at the same time because of the darkness and reality that has been so well preserved in these kinds of books. There is some of that in here.

4. Another of my little tourism hobby horses is visiting state houses, which are usually old, attractive, uncrowded places, with a sense of drama and grandeur in understated ways. They often have old and somewhat grand bathrooms, for example, or staircases, or elevators, or light fixtures, or trees on the grounds, that have not been substantially modernized since the end of World War II. So it was enjoyable for me that much of the book took place in one of these buildings.

Most of the other things that come to mind are repititions of things I have already touched upon.

The New and Improved Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

I had written last time of changing the challenge to a tournament format. My initial plan had been to include every book (or movie, or record album) that came up in one giant tournament, but the magic words for All the King's Men produced around 70 competitors, most of which, as you can get a hint of in the list below, consisted of prestige books, which was a departure from the last Challenges under the old system. I decided to limit the field to the top sixteen contenders and see how that worked out:

1. Hunger Games: Catching Fire (movie).....................8,580
2. Secret Life of Walter Mitty (movie-2012)..................2,392
3. Carlos Ruiz Zafon--Shadow of the Wind....................1,633
4. Betty Smith--A Tree Grows in Brooklyn....................1,475
5. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (movie)........................1,278
6. Donna Tartt--The Little Friend......................................924
7. David Foster Wallace--Infinite Jest...............................792
8. Night of the Living Dead (movie)..................................699
9. Nicole Krauss--The History of Love..............................599
10. Elizabeth Gaskell--North and South............................598
11. Jonathan Safran Foer--Everything is Illuminated........584
12. Charade (movie)..........................................................583
13. Don Delillo--Underworld.............................................397
14. Cecilia Ahern--P.S. I Love You.....................................396
15. Salman Rushdie--Midnight's Children.........................346
16. Virginia Woolf--To the Lighthouse..............................308

First, or Sweet Sixteen Round

#16 Virginia Woolf over #1 the Hunger Games.

Any good book will always have the preference over any movie in these tournaments, with the exception of one circumstance that I will reveal if the case ever arises.

#15 Salman Rushdie over #2 Walter Mitty

#3 Carlos Ruiz Zafon over #14 Cecilia Ahern

I don't know anything yet about Carlos Ruiz Zafon but the Ahern book appears to be a cookie-cutter genre/romance novel for the wine-drinking, shoe-shopping Sex in the City crowd, and I had marked it for automatic elimination against any 'real' book.

#4 Betty Smith over #13 Don Delillo

Besides being the higher seed, Betty Smith's book is shorter, older, and is more in the range of what I feel like reading at this time.

#12 Charade over #5 Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Any movie with some claim to classic status that I have not seen will almost always have the preference over a more modern movie.

#11 Jonathan Safran Foer over #6 Donna Tartt

An extremely tight battle between two books that came out in the same year (2002), neither of which I am especially interested in reading. Foer wins because it's 300 pages shorter.

#10 Elizabeth Gaskell over #7 David Foster Wallace

Though I am not dying to read him either, I would give David Foster Wallace the win over markedly inferior competition. However Mrs Gaskell is good competition, she is older, and even at 521 pages her book is half the length of Wallace's.

#9 Nicole Krauss over #8 Night of the Living Dead.

Nicole Krauss has come up on the challenge twice now. I am mildly interested in her.

Elite 8

#3 Carlos Ruiz Zafon over #16 Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf loses here because I have already read To the Lighthouse. It is of course a great book, or at least I thought it was at the time that I read it, but I am curious enough about the highly seeded Zafon to be comfortable pressing forward with him.

#4 Betty Smith over #15 Salman Rushdie

Another grinder for Betty Smith over a powerful modern brand. However, her book was still shorter as well as older, and she was the higher seed as well. Those are deciding factors in this tournament.

#9 Nicole Krauss over #12 Charade

I have not read enough of the new young literary people to be be desirous of dismissing them out of hand against movies. Yet

#11 Jonathan Safran Foer over #10 Elizabeth Gaskell

Foer probably would have won here anyway due to his book's being 300 pages shorter. However a third criterion I am using is local library availability, and North and South does not seem to be in the collection of either of the libraries I can go to.

Final Four

#11 Jonathan Safron Foer Over #3 Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Availability and publication date were a wash here. Zafon got extra consideration because his book is a translation and we get so few books not written in English on the Challenge. Foer again wins by a nose because his book is 200 pages shorter. I don't mean to emphasize length so much, but I already have two literary lists I read off of, and this challenge is intended to be a means for me to find some fun reads that did not quite qualify for either of my lists and to keep in contact what is going on in contemporary life without excessive tension and anxiety.

#4 Betty Smith over #9 Nicole Krauss

Along with Foer, Betty Smith had the toughest draw in the tournament, Krauss's book is considerably shorter, but Smith wins on age and for being the higher seed.

The championship

#4 Betty Smith over #11 Jonahan Safron Foer.

Similar set-up to the Krauss win. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is clearly the kind of book that I like, and I am looking forward to reading it.