Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1922. The Pulitzer 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.
Fashion, parties, and uppity servants, oh my. Par for the Puliltzer course so far. The difference in this book is that the Adams family believes they’re a smidge away from breaking into the upper crust and just have to fake it until they make it.
(The book states Papa Adams made $1100/year, which was apparently enough in 1921 to be the sole breadwinner in a family of four, live in a 2-story house, and employ a cook. According to a federal inflation calculator, that’s slightly less than $20K in 2025 money, which is $12K below poverty level for a family of four. Never let anyone tell you income has kept up with cost of living.)
Alice is trying to fit in with a higher class of people, and I was withering with secondhand embarrassment the whole time. Her “friends” openly snub her. She goes to a party and thinks no one other than her brother will dance with her, and the only offer she gets is from the one guy she specifically didn’t want to speak to because, regardless that he’s the only person in this book who speaks to her with basic human decency, he’s fat. Even the matrons in the corner at the party tell her to get lost. She’s not welcome in that sphere despite her determination to claim it as her own, which is obvious to the reader immediately but takes Alice 3/4 of the book (and all her previous life experience) to understand.
She tries to strike up a romance with a higher-class man by being fake and shallow, and he has no interest in scratching her pretty veneer. They’re ridiculous together. They talk about nothing. They mutually agree to split up without having a single conversation of any depth about why. The entire relationship served no purpose other than making me hate both characters.
Mrs. Adams bullies her husband, who is recovering from what sounds like a stroke, to quit the job he’s had all his life and go into debt to start a glue factory using a formula he developed for the only boss he’s ever had. She believes this is the way to finally make the family rich—by going into debt and pissing off a rich man by poaching his proprietary formula. That goes about as well as you’d expect, and in the end Mr. Adams has another stroke when his former boss throws up a HUGE glue factory and drives him out of business, Mrs. Adams has turned their home into a boarding house to bring in enough money to survive, and Alice has given up the life of a wannabe socialite and enrolled in business school so she can get a job. Stories about people whose lives are complicated by jobs are more interesting (indeed, getting the little glue factory up and running was the most interesting part of this book), but that’s where this story ends.
The dialogue is excruciatingly repetitive. Not only are topics of conversation limited and rehashed with no development from one instance to the next, the actual words used are recycled endlessly. Mr. Adams says “Oh, my, my!” 9 times in Chapter 13 (plus Mrs. Adams mocking him with it once additionally). All this great wit does is invite his wife to keep repeating what she has already said a dozen times. We know! DO SOMETHING!
Casual racism comes up A LOT. Tarkington was compelled to racialize the laugh of a passerby. The cooks that keep quitting (can’t imagine why) are literally referred to as “those people.” They LIKE the air pollution from the glue factory because it gives them something to complain about, according to Mr. Adams. Brother Walter uses one slur repeatedly in a single conversation with his sister, like a little kid who learned a naughty word and has to cram it into every sentence. It went way beyond necessary character and setting and well into the realm of “the author relished including it.”
I haven’t liked any of these books, but this was the worst so far. I’ve been out of school for a long time and forgot how much I despise assigned reading, and that sentiment apparently applies to reading I’ve assigned myself. I’ll have to binge read every old favorite to recover when this is over.
Next month’s assignment is One of Ours by Willa Cather. Fingers crossed a book about a farmer’s son and soldier will appeal even a tiny bit to my working class sensibilities. (I had similar hope last month when promised a non-wealthy heroine, though, and look how that turned out.)