His Family by Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918. The prize is awarded to works of “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” This is one of (at the time of this writing) 10 Pulitzer-winning books that are no longer under copyright and are available free via Project Gutenberg.
Roger’s dying wife, Judith, said she would look forward to reuniting with him in the afterlife and hearing all about the lives of their daughters. After her death, Roger had a prolonged crisis of grief, began to doubt that reunion would ever happen, and distanced himself from the girls. Years later, he reconsiders and worries about not being able to tell Judith much about the family he’s ignored. He decides to get more involved in the girls’ lives just as the youngest announces her engagement to some guy he’s never met.
The eldest daughter, Edith, is married with a gaggle of kids (five?), a regular 1917 tradwife. Deborah is a school principal who dates but doesn’t want to give up her work to get married and squirt out babies. She has progressive ideas about education like “find ways to make learning interesting” that Edith doesn’t want her children infected by. Laura, the youngest, considers marriage an “experiment” and wants nothing to do with children, which leads to both Edith and Roger telling her she’s being unnatural and will be punished by god with a life of misery. Two of three are bucking convention in some way.
Roger is a casual bigot toward the Jewish and Italian children Deborah teaches. He’s too genteel to throw around slurs, but he’s very clear they’re animals turning “his” city into a filthy zoo. He also enjoys going to the ghetto (the book’s word choice) to score great deals on destitute immigrants’ jewelry from pawn shops. (I suspected, before I began the assignment, that I would encounter this sort of worldview. Lack of surprise doesn’t make it less gross.)
If you strain really hard, you might squeeze some “circle of life” meaning out of the rings, but the only time they come up, other than “I found an immigrant pawn shop and bought another ring,” is when Laura shows them to him on his deathbed. Roger briefly considers selling them when money gets tight but doesn’t follow through. He doesn’t take them out and admire them in order to get any enjoyment from his collection. They were apparently hidden, and Laura only found them when she was looting the house, so they weren’t meant as an inheritance. The rings do nothing but show Roger to be mildly acquisitive, a trait that is never relevant elsewhere. Since the rest of the family didn’t seem to know about the collection, Laura probably dumped everything in her purse to pay for a new rug for her war profiteering office in Europe.
Laura’s marriage experiment ended in mutual cheating and divorce, after which she absconded to Italy with her lover, who was her first husband’s partner in getting rich off the war, a business she thinks is delightful. Essentially, “Well, they’re going to kill each other anyway. Why shouldn’t I live lavishly off the proceeds?” She bucked convention so hard, she turned into a World War I Eva Braun. Notably, she’s having a great time despite her divorce and unused uterus. Young, beautiful, rich, moisturized, unbothered, and oblivious that Ernest made her a cartoon villain. The important thing is that you know she’s like this because she didn’t want to be a mommy.
Edith’s husband gets hit by a car and dies, at which time it’s revealed their lifestyle was in excess of their means, so she’s not just penniless but in debt. Roger takes her in along with the gaggle of kids and pays off the debt by mortgaging his house (but not selling those rings!). Edith, immune to the sensation of financial embarrassment, redecorates, keeps the nanny, and continues sending her kids to private schools. Oh, and evicts Roger’s disabled employee from the spare room so her son can have it. What a peach. When this all strains the household budget, she is outraged that Deborah is spending money ON HER SCHOOLS’ PROGRAMS rather than using that public money to fund private school education for Edith’s crotch goblins. (We are later supposed to believe Edith quietly acquiesced to moving to a farm in the mountains and sending her precious babies to a village school with the peasants, an interaction Ernest didn’t even write because he knew there was no way to sell it.)
Deborah, meanwhile, is a fucking saint. Her ideas about education and community outreach are demonstrably working, and the very day the school board puts her in charge of implementing her programs at four additional schools, her father thinks, “At last! Now she will obviously get married and start popping out babies!” Fortunately, Allan (the man who loves Deborah) actually respects her. He believes in the work she’s doing, to the extent that he gave up a more lucrative medical practice to start a clinic that’s part of Deborah’s suite of social programs. He believes they can have a life together with her career, whereas Roger and Edith are on her ass constantly. The woman can’t have a cup of tea without one of them swanning through to say she’s wasting her life. At the end, when all the people I’d come to hate were either dead or geographically distant, I rejoiced that our long-suffering Queen Deb was at last free. With a couple decades of therapy, she could probably get their hateful voices out of her head so she doesn’t briefly turn into them the next time she’s in acute distress and tell some poor student with a womb that she exists only to breed.
If you enjoy sitcoms about families who communicate solely by arguing, you might enjoy this book. If that stresses you out or if you just don’t want to read on every third page that a woman’s entire existence must be about children (but not just any children! specifically children extruded from her own loins!), this book is not a good time. It doesn’t even have clever or lyrical prose to recommend it. I had a ton of highlights of the “fuck all y’all” variety and none for a stunning turn of phrase.
I felt neither entertained nor enriched by this reading experience. Do better, Pulitzer 1919. We shall meet in February.
If you want to play along, the next book will be The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, available here.