His Family

Long overdue review of His Family by Ernest Poole

First, apologies for not reviewing the book sooner. I could come up with a list of excuses, but in truth I feel excuses are lame and that you can find time for the things that you really want to do if you make a conscious effort. 

This book is a story about Roger and his family, primarily his three daughters Ethel, Deborah and Laura. Roger's wife has been dead for some time and he keeps remembering her words that they would always live on in their family, in their posterity.

I could not help but read and experience this book through the lens of what is happening in my own life, namely the addition of a son in law and daughter in law, the birth of my first grandchild and the death of my last living grandparent. This book seemed very much about the passage of time to me, and the evidence of that in my own life colored my reading of this book. Not that I feel there was anything negative in that coloring, all books are experienced through the lens of the reader. I just wonder if it would have been a different book if I had read it 10 years ago...

The backdrop for this book is the rapidly changing world of Roger, living in New York right before World War One. The influx of immigrants, the changing of social mores, these things are both troublesome and intriguing to Roger. As the story progresses these things, along with the First World War, impact his family and he needs to make emotional and intellectual adjustments to deal with their impact.

Roger's daughters personify the different types of women that the day offered- the traditional wife and mother, the career woman and the party girl.

Ethel is the traditional wife and mother, pregnant with her fifth child. Ethel is concerned with the outside world only so far as it might effect her children. She truly believes her chosen way of life is far superior to that of her sisters and that they will only be happy once they are married with children of their own. I'll leave my own feelings (highly charged and biased) out of this post and just talk about how this attitude of Ethel's both holds her back and holds her together. She seems to miss out on much of the richness of life because of her myopic view. She dreams for her children, but those dreams are limited by her own prejudices and lack of vision. However, when she is widowed soon after her fifth child is born this fervent belief in the rightness of her choices and her love for her children is what gives her the necessary strength to push forward.

Deborah is a public school principal concerned with furthering the opportunities of all of the children in her schools. She is particularly concerned with the plight of the poor immigrant children and their families and is committed to trying to change their lot in life through programs provided by the schools. Roger seems to not really understand Deborah's career at the beginning of the book, he thinks she is a teacher of one class not the principal overseeing three schools. He decides to learn more about her work and it is through her that he begins to really see that the changes to the city bring positive things with them as well as the shifts in the familiar that disturb him.

Laura is the party girl, the social butterfly only interested in dancing and fun and nightlife. It is difficult to like Laura, and were it not for Roger's love of her it would be hard to see anything redeeming in her. She very much reminded me F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gloria, from The Beautiful and the Damned. Selfish and driven only by pleasure. This comes back to haunt Laura, and therefore Roger.

As time passes and the family deals with all of the turmoil life presents, Roger seems to gain a deeper understanding of both his personal mortality and the immortality of his posterity. This could have been the story of many families living in New York at the time. It was deeply personal and global at the same time.

I read this book online at the Gutenberg Project website, a wonderful resource for older books and for anyone without a budget to buy books.

This book was the first to win the Pulitzer. I am glad that I chose to read it at the time I did, as it truly enriched my life.