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.

His Family- Beautiful Sentences and Passages

I finished His Family by Ernest Poole last night. As mentioned in an earlier post, I have been keeping track of some of the passages in the book that have particularly struck a coard with me. This post will share those.

Chapter 5
As he listened to his daughter he kept wondering if she were so sure. Had she felt no uneasiness? She must have, he decided, for all her gay excitement. One Laura in that smiling face; another Laura deep inside, doubting and uncertain, reaching for her happiness, now elated, now dismayed, exclaiming, "Now at last I'm starting!" Oh, what an ignorant child she was. He wanted to cry out to her, "You'll always be just starting! You'll never be sure, you'll never be happy, you'll always be just beginning to be! And the happier you are, the more you will feel it is only a start!... And then-"

From Chapter 7: a very descriptive passage
A plump little fool of a woman, her skirt so tight she could barely walk, tripped by on high-heeled slippers. That was it, he told himself, the whole city was high-heeled! No solid footing anywhere!

Chapter 8
But even those old memories were no longer here to hearten him. They had all been swept away when Bruce had made him move out of his office in a dark creaky edifice down close under Brooklyn Bridge, and come up to this new building, this [72]steel-ribbed caravansary for all kinds of business ventures, this place of varnished woodwork, floods of daylight, concrete floors, this building fireproof throughout. That expressed it exactly, Roger thought. Nothing could take fire here, not even a man's imagination, even though he did not feel old.


I found this in Chapter 14
"I was once a child." To most of us these are mere words. To few is it ever given to attain so much as even a glimpse into the warm and quivering soul of that little stranger of long ago. We do not know how we were made.


Chapter 28

Dead and wounded by the
thousands, famine, bombs and shrapnel, hideous atrocities, submarines and
floating mines, words once remote but now familiar, always there on the
front page and penetrating into his soul, becoming a part of Roger Gale, so
that never again when the war was done would he be the same man he was
before. For he had forever lost his faith in the sanity and steadiness of
the great mind of humanity. Roger had thought of mankind as mature, but
there had come to him of late the same feeling he had had before in the
bosom of his family. Mankind had suddenly unmasked and shown itself for
what it was--still only a precocious child, with a terrible precocity. For
its growth had been one sided. Its strength was growing at a speed
breathless and astounding. But its vision and its poise, its sense of human
justice, of kindliness and tolerance and of generous brotherly love, these
had been neglected and were being left behind.

and also:  

But Edith was not old-fashioned, nor was she alive to this modern age. In short, she was neither here nor there!

Chapter 36
"I look into my family back and back, and I see how it has been made of many generations. Certain figures stand out in my mind—they cover over a hundred years. And I see how much they've meant to me. I see that I've been one of them—a link in a long chain of lives—all inter-bound and reaching on. In my life they have all been here—as I shall be in lives to come.

So Many Books, So Little Time

I have to admit that I have gotten distracted in the last little bit. I've been reading another book, The Art of Intrusion. Is a book detailing the real exloits of hackers, as told to Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick himself is a former hacker. I must say that I am really enjoying the book, and it is afterall related to work.

That being said, last night I did get back to reading His Family and remembered how much I was enjoying it. I read several chapters and ended up staying awake a little later than desired.

So it appears as though I have two reviews coming forth shortly.

So many books, so little time...

An Idea

I had an idea as I was reading tonight.

I am currently reading His Family by Ernest Poole, and I am really enjoying it.

One of the things I love about literature is finding beautifully constructed sentences and prose that touch me, or affect me somehow. So what I am going to do is create posts for each book that contain my favorite sentences so that I can share them with you.

These posts will be separate from the posts actually reviewing the book or story.

I just love the written word, I love to read, and I want to share that love with like minded people.

Gutenberg Project

I've decided to use the Gutenberg Project to read some of the older books on my list.

This is a website that has taken older books that are past the copyright time and made them available for free online.

I have started to read His Family, by Ernest Poole. I'll be reviewing it as soon as I am done. I'm already enjoying it.