Winesburg, Ohio (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Patchwork of Passions and Delusions
Review: Abnderson's collection of short stories presents a gradually cohesive story cycle about some curious residents of fictitious Winesburg, Ohio in the early 20th century. Like a literary repertory company, various characters appear in spotlight, then reappear in shadows or the wings of life. Readers never know who will turn up in what is supposed to be another character's tale. The faces on main street seem vaguely familiar, since people do not live in a social vacuum. Many tales include flashbacks about events and emotions which are just now being revealed.

Curiously, many of the odd characters (which Anderson terms "Grotesques" because they are emotional cripples) turn to young George Willard, a reporter for the local paper--perhaps the author's alter-ego. Sensing his willingness to listen and his genuine compassion for his fellow men, they slip out of their discomfort zones briefly to share a hidden portion of their lives. Subconsciously they feel that George can be entrusted with their secrets--passions and dreams which no one in town ever suspected. This young man proves a magnet for the grotesques of Winesburg, since he offers an unspoken promise of future validation of their universal failures and frustrations. He serves as the keeper of secrets, without passing judgment.

One's first impression is that the book is pessimistic, even morbid, since the author depicts the loneliness and futility of the human condition. Yet there remains a quiet, underlying hope for the future, as the older generations trust youth to sort out the warped threads of fate and foiled ambition. Is this a fair burden to place on a young man just starting out, expecting him to reweave a finer tapestry? Must he preserve their private goals, even if the world regards the dreamers as queer? Are young people condemned to leave their home town, in order to achieve happiness, success and a sense of self worth? With the focus on George's final days in Winesburg, the last three stories bind and complete this literary composite of a rural, mid western town. Vintage village vignettes, from an author who influenced many more famous American writers.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Time. I Did.
Review: I just finished this book and I have to say that I honestly didn't think it was very good. I've read different things about this book for years, and everyone talks like this is some landmark piece of American prose, but I don't get it. The stories are rambling and sloppy and often pointless. The writing seems very amateurish. I got tired of hearing about how every young man in the book felt this yearning to leave Winesburg and see "Life". I mean, isn't that the biggest cliche of small town life that there is. And he kept hitting that same note over and over and over and over again, like a nail being driven into my skull. With all the acclaim this book has gotten, it's safe to say that the Devil has the deed to Anderson's soul safely filed away somewhere.

This book reminded me a little of Saroyan's The Human Comedy. Both books are quirky and they both have an odd way of sounding as if their characters come from children's books. I wasn't too crazy about The Human Comedy either, but it's like a Shakesperian masterpiece compared to this. The Human Comedy's quirkiness is charming, while Winesburg's quirkiness just makes the book seem inept. The Human comedy is much more tightly organized and better written and it's loosely connected episodes almost, almost, form a narrative structure. If you really want to read about life in an American small town, then please, read The Human Comedy or Lake Wobegon Days, or even Rose Wilder Lane's Old Home Town. There's nothing that you'll get out of this book that you can't get from any of these others.

In the introduction to my edition, Irving Howe talks about how much this book inspired him when he was a teenager and opened up new depths of emotion and blah, blah, blah. I find this a little hard to believe. When I was 16 I read Kerouac's On the Road and I was swept away, so I know the kind of experience he's talking about. But I feel very sorry for anyone who claims that this book sent their young heart fluttering. I can imagine someone young reading Victor Hugo or Dickens or Thomas Wolfe or Gone With The Wind and feeling that the flame of their life has been lit. But not Winesburg. Please, please no, not Winesburg. This book is like a box of wet matches and broken sticks.

Rating:
Summary: Unhappy people trapped in sad webs of their own making
Review: Sherwood Anderson published this collection of short stories in 1919 all set in fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio. Even though it's written in the third person, it's told through the narrative voice of George Willard, the town reporter, who shows up in most of the stories, sometimes taking an active role and at other times just telling a story.

It is obvious that the writer loves these people, and is frustrated at the isolation and unhappiness of their lives, even though he makes it clear that they hold within themselves everything needed to make them happy. The character in the first story is a dying old writer who is attempting to write about all the people he has known as a "book of grotesques". What follows is the collection of stories, which each character fulfilling that expectation.

There are the young lovers who don't quite connect; there is a old man so obsessed with religious fervor that he attempts to sacrifice his grandson; there is a married man who regrets it all and tries to warn a younger man of future unhappiness; there's a doctor and a sick woman who try to connect. The book is full of people who toil all their lives and never achieve happiness. As I made my way through the book I kept hoping that even one of the characters would rise above the morass. It didn't happen.

The writer has a wonderful sense of place and the town of Winesburg in the early part of the 20th Century is very real. These people were not poor or disadvantaged in the usual sense of the word; they didn't suffer fire, floods or famine. Instead, they trapped themselves in their own psychological webs that made it impossible for them to lead anything but sad unfulfilled lives. This is a fine book and stands alone as a clear voice of its time.

Rating:
Summary: Winesburgers
Review: Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" is a string of twenty-one connected stories (plus an introduction) that, like James Joyce's "Dubliners", links a community of people to a single place and time and explores common themes. Most of the stories are told from the vista of the recurring central character George Willard, the local newspaper reporter and a sort of alter ego of Anderson, who used his own rural hometown of Clyde, Ohio, as a model for Winesburg.

Rather than an idyllic portrayal of American small town life in the 1890's, these stories are about psychological isolation, loneliness, and sexual repression and frustration brought about by small town mores. These people are as sad and neurotic as any that might be found living in the big cities. Anderson calls them "grotesques," people who are warped by the sanctimoniousness of provincial piety and their own inhibitions. His nonchalant, ironic way of writing understates the peculiarity and the gloominess of the stories.

The stories are loaded with symbolism that is difficult to decipher. My favorite is probably the four-part "Godliness", which, in a satire of religious fervor, merges parodies of the biblical tales of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac and David's slaying of Goliath. But all the stories have interesting allusions of various degrees of subtlety. This work must have seemed quite groundbreaking in its depth, complexity, and boldness when it was first published in 1919.