Cliffsnotes Rise of Silas Lapham (Cliffs Notes)

Rating:
Summary: "Boston Paint Tycoon Plots to Gatecrash Elite : Loses Shirt"
Review: The photographs of Alfred Stieglitz still look modern and talented today, but it's nearly impossible to imagine how they would have looked to viewers in the 1890s, when they were taken. They were revolutionary, amazing, radically avant-garde. In a similar vein, the first novel about an American industrialist---a novel first printed in 1885---cannot seem so new, so fresh to our 21st century eyes. This theme startles nobody anymore. But in tracing the ups and downs of Silas Lapham, late of a Vermont village, a Civil War veteran, and founder of a fortune in 1870s Boston, Howells produced a highly original novel for his day. Lapham, his plain-spoken wife Persis, and two daughters live in luxury, thanks to the successful paint manufacturing business whose ubiquitous ads disfigured large portions of the New England countryside. Puffed up with success and not averse to considerable bragging, Lapham decides to build a sumptuous mansion on the water side of Beacon Street in the then-new district of Back Bay. At the same time, the Laphams come into contact with a family from the old Boston Brahmin elite, a family whose son falls in love with a Lapham daughter. The reaction of both families to this potential liaison, the love affair itself, and the fate of the Lapham fortune form the subject of this solid novel.

William Dean Howells was and is known as one of the early American "realists", as opposed to the more romantic style that dominated most of 19th century English language literature. Not being a person well-versed in the "accepted wisdom" of literary criticism and history, I can only say that compared to later writers, for example, Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and Sinclair, to be followed later by Anderson and Lewis, I find that Howells' work still retains plenty of the more romantic elements even while he does portray the life and business of a paint tycoon with considerable accuracy and empathy. No snobbish repudiator of nouveaux riches gaucheries, Howells. This book is not a sarcastic look at the "ridiculous efforts of a bourgeois to climb above his station". Lapham may have his faults, but he is essentially a good, likeable man. If you have an interest in Boston history or in knowing what Boston life was like in the 1870s, I believe you will certainly enjoy reading THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM. The story is a little artificial, the language a bit outdated, I felt, though in comparison to the horrors and perversities that throng some modern works, the novel might fill a few winter afternoons with a quiet pleasure. Certain stylistic oddities surprised me, such as the sudden appearance of a narrative "I" after over 200 pages ! Howells has been quite neglected in recent times: for sure, he may not be a Dostoevsky, Balzac, or Faulkner, but don't brush him off.

Rating:
Summary: A Gem of Its Time
Review: These days Howells is usually overlooked in favor of the more overtly urbane Henry James or the grittier Stephen Crane or Theodore Dreiser. That's a shame, since Howells at his best is a more varied and thought-provoking author than any of them. The Rise of Silas Lapham is Howells at his best. The title is quite ironic, of course, but ultimately spot-on, as Howells' nouveau-riche bumpkin is redeemed only in losing it all. Lapham is keenly drawn, alternately frustrating in his bluster and affected pompousness and endearing in his genuine (if sometimes poorly expressed) love for his family. Other characters are not so fortunate; one of his daughters remains mostly a cipher, and both Mrs. Lapham and Bromfield Corey, the rich scion of society whose favor Lapham so earnestly covets, are dangerously close to stock characters. Howells excels at elaborate descriptive prose focused on intricate detail, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Some elements of the plot may seem quaint to modern readers, but Howells does not treat them with condescension. The Rise of Silas Lapham is definitely a book of its time. Perhaps it is so rewarding because his time and ours are not necessarily so different as we think.

Rating:
Summary: Mogul with a conscience
Review: William Dean Howells's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" is one of the earliest American novels about a businessman, and that qualification alone makes it a literary curiosity, but what is most remarkable about it is what its title character is not, rather than what he is. Silas Lapham is not a ruthless, villainously greedy tycoon who bullies his employees and relishes destroying the careers of his competitors and enemies, but a conscientious, likeable man to whom misfortune happens because of his gullibility and sense of guilt rather than hubris.

Lapham is a human emblem of the new American industrial economy of the 1870s. A self-made millionaire in the paint business, he is now one of the richest men in Boston and is radiantly proud of the fact that he has earned every dollar. Having grown up poor and undereducated in Vermont, he still speaks in a rustic vernacular and has yet to understand the rationale behind the rules of high society, let alone assimilate them. A simple, practical man with a sense of duty, he even put aside his business to serve in the Civil War, in which he was seriously wounded and achieved the rank of colonel. He can be boastful and garrulous, but he is not arrogant or overbearing.

Lapham is dearly devoted to his wife Persis, who in turn has supported him through thick and thin, and his two daughters. Penelope, the older girl, is relatively plain but witty and sardonic and, at least in the first half of the novel, never seems to take anything seriously; her sister Irene is the more beautiful but vapid and superficial. Irene falls for Tom Corey, the young man who comes to work for her father as a foreign sales representative, but Tom and Penelope have a mutual attraction that, Penelope fears, could break Irene's heart. This romantic subplot allows Howells to contrast Tom's family, part of the old Boston aristocracy, with the even wealthier but socially crude Laphams with whose daughter Tom's mother has snobbish doubts about his possible union.

The novel has almost the air of Greek tragedy in that Lapham is a man of stature who has fatal flaws that threaten to destroy him. He is a teetotaller, and when he does take the liberty of trying some wine at a dinner party, he embarrasses himself and his family by talking too much. He abstains from gambling, but, instigated by his former business partner and current gadfly Milton Rogers, he gets into financial trouble when he stakes money on bad property and bad stocks. And, to compensate for a traumatic event in his past, he is charitable almost to a fault to a pretty girl whom he employs as a typist in his office.

The style of "The Rise of Silas Lapham" is a dramatic realism similar to that found in the novels of Howells's contemporaries Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser; the structure is straightforward, and the dialogue cuts to the core in laying bare the characters' sentiments and unfolding the plot. It may fall short of being a "great" novel, but for its candid portrayal of a specimen of the nouveau riche, it can be considered a minor monument of nineteenth century American literature.