Rating: 
Summary: thankfully saved from the ash heap
Review: This Pulitzer Prize winning novel tells the story of the decline of the once magnificent Amberson family, the leading family of a Midwestern city at the turn of the century. George Amberson Minafer is the spoiled young heir to the Amberson fortune, but America is now entering the automobile age & the conservative Ambersons are ill equiped to deal with the rapid changes. Tarkington intertwines two tragic love stories with the theme of the Ambersons decline and produces one of the really great forgotten novels that I've ever read. Perhaps the book got lost because of the great screen version that Orson Welles produced, but whatever the reason, this is a book that deserves a wider audience and Modern Library is to be applauded for including it on the list. GRADE: A
Rating:
Summary: Intensely Readable
Review: Who would have thought that a novel from 1918 would be such a page turner? Not to generalize, but there aren't many books pre-1920 or so that I've been unable to put down. Until "The Magnificent Ambersons." Covering a span of roughly 20 years in the lives and fortunes of the Amberson/Minafer family, Booth Tarkington uses the fall of the family from its privileged social standing as a symbol of the blurring distinction between classes that took place in the country's urban areas at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Ambersons live in a stately mansion, separated from the outside world by vast lawns and gates, and gradually watch their secluded neighborhood overrun by cheap apartment buildings, increased traffic and pollution. What Tarkington does, nearly 80 years before the actual phrase came into common usage, is address the problems associated with urban sprawl. The book has two of the most colorful characters ever put down on paper: Georgie Amberson Minafer, the spoiled brat protagonist who fights most fiercely to retain the family's position as one of the most distinguished in the city; and Aunt Fanny, the manipulative spinster who doesn't understand just how serious the consequences of her gossiping and meddling (to her merely distractions from the boredom and tedium of her life) can be. I surprisingly felt much sympathy for Georgie. He can be odious at times admittedly, and more than once you want to see him slapped silly, and at one point in the novel you honestly begin to wonder if perhaps he's mentally ill, so extreme are the measures to which he will go in the sake of what he thinks is protecting his mother's good name. But by the time the novel ended, I couldn't help being won over by him. He's got an overbearing personality, but I shared his opinion of the ugliness he sees sprouting up around him. His obsession with a time gone by springs from naivete, and as he grows over the course of the novel, he experiences a shift of priorities, as all adults do as they become adults. In many ways, Tarkington's novel is about dealing with maturity and the occassional disillusionment that can accompany it. There's a beautiful passage in which Georgie's uncle George (Georgie's namesake) explains that youth can never understand the triviality of the things it takes so seriously (status, passion, success) and will never be able to understand it until youth has become middle age. And Georgie's grandfather, responsible for the wealth of the family, realizes on his deathbed the ultimate uselessness of all the material goods he has acquired over a lifetime. If you would like to see a good film version as a companion piece to the novel, see the 1942 Orson Welles version rather than the A&E version from a few years ago. Welles' film is butchered and as a result tells only a very truncated version of the story, but it gets the tone just right, and Agnes Moorehead's dead-on portrayal of Fanny is one of cinema history's highlights. The A&E adaptation, meanwhile, is dreadful. But please don't let either of these film versions take the place of the novel itself. It lingers in the mind long after the final page has been turned.
Rating:
Summary: Intensely Readable
Review: Who would have thought that a novel from 1918 would be such a page turner? Not to generalize, but there aren't many books pre-1920 or so that I've been unable to put down. Until "The Magnificent Ambersons." Covering a span of roughly 20 years in the lives and fortunes of the Amberson/Minafer family, Booth Tarkington uses the fall of the family from its privileged social standing as a symbol of the blurring distinction between classes that took place in the country's urban areas at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Ambersons live in a stately mansion, separated from the outside world by vast lawns and gates, and gradually watch their secluded neighborhood overrun by cheap apartment buildings, increased traffic and pollution. What Tarkington does, nearly 80 years before the actual phrase came into common usage, is address the problems associated with urban sprawl. The book has two of the most colorful characters ever put down on paper: Georgie Amberson Minafer, the spoiled brat protagonist who fights most fiercely to retain the family's position as one of the most distinguished in the city; and Aunt Fanny, the manipulative spinster who doesn't understand just how serious the consequences of her gossiping and meddling (to her merely distractions from the boredom and tedium of her life) can be. I surprisingly felt much sympathy for Georgie. He can be odious at times admittedly, and more than once you want to see him slapped silly, and at one point in the novel you honestly begin to wonder if perhaps he's mentally ill, so extreme are the measures to which he will go in the sake of what he thinks is protecting his mother's good name. But by the time the novel ended, I couldn't help being won over by him. He's got an overbearing personality, but I shared his opinion of the ugliness he sees sprouting up around him. His obsession with a time gone by springs from naivete, and as he grows over the course of the novel, he experiences a shift of priorities, as all adults do as they become adults. In many ways, Tarkington's novel is about dealing with maturity and the occassional disillusionment that can accompany it. There's a beautiful passage in which Georgie's uncle George (Georgie's namesake) explains that youth can never understand the triviality of the things it takes so seriously (status, passion, success) and will never be able to understand it until youth has become middle age. And Georgie's grandfather, responsible for the wealth of the family, realizes on his deathbed the ultimate uselessness of all the material goods he has acquired over a lifetime. If you would like to see a good film version as a companion piece to the novel, see the 1942 Orson Welles version rather than the A&E version from a few years ago. Welles' film is butchered and as a result tells only a very truncated version of the story, but it gets the tone just right, and Agnes Moorehead's dead-on portrayal of Fanny is one of cinema history's highlights. The A&E adaptation, meanwhile, is dreadful. But please don't let either of these film versions take the place of the novel itself. It lingers in the mind long after the final page has been turned.
| 
