Customer Reviews

Death in the Family

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"A Death in the Family" is one of those books that falls into the "great works tarnished by high school English class" category. I read this book in the Tenth grade and garnered no sense of its raw literary power at that time since my teacher was more interested in using it to bash Catholicism than to explore its wonderful prose.

Many years later I read the book again while living abroad. Since I was not in an English speaking environment the language and mood of the novel were even more evocative.

I was astounded when I reread the essay called "Knoxville Summer of 1915" that precedes the rest of the novel. This is one of the most beautiful and most effective pieces of English I have ever come across. Agee describes a child's observation of his neighbors evening activities in their back yard in a subtle sequence of events. The essay mixes dreamy metaphor with detailed observation in a slow, rhythmic description. The child observes the rolled up shirt sleeves of fathers watering their lawn after dinner and then tells himself that now the night is a "blue dew". The genius behind this is how the child makes the transition for detailed observation to poetic descriptions of the entire experience.

The rest of the novel is wonderful in parts but hardly equals the opening essay. Agee is very talented at conveying character, dialog, and mood. We sense the warmth of family life before the father's death and the absolute confusion and bewilderment that follow. It is very painful to read about how the narrator, as an awkward child, is momentarily accepted by his classmates because his father's death is a new and interesting topic for them. It is a terrible thing that in a roundabout way, the callousness of the boy's classmates converts his father's death into a moment of joy. But it is also one of life's realistic irony.

The subject matter of this book is tragic and even in its most poetic parts its mood is very grim. You may want to keep this in mind before reading it.

Agee, who gave us the words to Walker Evans' photoessay "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and the script for the African Queen, was a genius. Like may geniuses he was erratic. I cannot read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I find it Joycian in all the worst senses of that word. But A Death in the Family is a different story.

If you read this and have the courage to really let it sink into you, you will feel the extraordinary pain of a family torn apart by a pedestrian but tragic event - an automobile crash. The shock hits you. The grief overcomes you. You feel the loss. In short, you understand. That is what all artists strive to do and what Agee stunningly succeeds at here.

The beauty here is the beauty of truth, mainlined slowly into your being. This is a book that can and probably will change the reader.

Several reviews have mentioned the breathtaking prelude "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" and some mention the Samuel Barber soprano version of this. To me that Barber piece ranks as one of the great American musical moments. That two such enormous accomplishments should derive from one small book is a tribute to the power and brilliance of James Agee at his finest.

James Agee's autobiographical novel A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, published posthumously in 1957 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize the following year, remains an American classic. In a nearly perfect treatise on how a family reacts to the death of a family member, Agee in beautiful, transparent prose as good as anything Christopher Isherwood or Truman Capote ever wrote, has given the world a novel that remains timeless. The story of course has universal appeal and touches everyone who reads it as all of us have lost or will lose a family member. It ultimately is about everything that matters.

In 1915, Jay Follet at the age of 36 is killed in a freak automobile accident near Knoxville, Tennessee. Agee lets us see inside the minds of his wife, his children, his parents, his brother-in-law et al. as each character grapples with this new hole in his or her life, trying to grasp the loss and make sense of it. Jay's wife Mary and her Christian faith are contrasted with the indifference of the organized church in the character of Father Jackson who refuses to read the complete burial service over Jay because he had not been baptised. In a beautiful passage near the end of the novel Andrew, Mary's brother, describes the burial to the six-year-old Rufus (based on Agee) when a "perfectly magnicent butterfly" settled on the coffin. Andrew believes that "that butterfly has got more of God in him than Jackson [the priest] will ever see for the rest of eternity." Mary's father, perhaps as only a loving parent can, gives her hard but honest advice: "It's bad enough right now, but it's going to take a while to sink in. . . It'll be so much worse you'll think it's more than you can bear. Or any other human being. And worse than that, you'll have to go through it alone, because there isn't a thing on earth any of us can do to help, beyond blind animal sympathy."

The novel opens with a prose poem "Knoxville: Summer 1915", later set to music by Samuel Barber. There are additional, similar lyrical prose pieces, usually seen through the eyes of Rufus, interspersed between the three divisions of the novel. Agee is a master at capturing the language and dialect of East Tennessee where children go snipe-hunting, they "waked up," and adults use expressions such as "bless his heart" and "poor old soul."

With the recent publication by The Library of America of two volumes of practically all of the works of Agee, this great writer should reach a much wider reading audience he so richly deserves.

Imagine, if you will, a group of family members, sitting around a recently deceased corpse arguing religion and theodicy - strong, literary, atheistic men on one side, weaker, pious women on the other- with the piquancy that only a recent death of one close to them all could possibly have brought about. Then, add to this a little boy looking upon all this and trying to make sense of it all, while trying to come to terms with his father's death. You now have the setting, if not the summary, of this book.

The men reflect on Thomas Hardy and Macbeth (Joel) and Shelley (Andrew) while the women mumble prayers and are bullied by a priest. When they first learn of the death Joel ruminates about his falling out with his wife, Hannah, that, "...Besides, that had never been the real estrangement; it was the whole stinking morass of churchliness that really separated them, and now that was apt to get worse rather than better. Apt? Dead certain to." And Joel is correct, it is "dead certain" to get worse. And it does.

Agee portrays the women sympathetically, but as essentially weak, pulling out old rosaries and succumbing to a sanctimonious priest who keeps a figurative whip of morality beneath his soutane and true viciousness under his unctuous smile. The widow, Mary, is finally defeated thusly: "For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently. But now she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transition to prayer was the moment and mark of her surrender."

The book does manage to convey of how terrible and heart-rending it is to deal with mortality through the autobiographical prose-poems in the mind of the boy, Rufus: "That this little boy whom he inhabited was only the cruelest of deceits. That he was but the nothingness of nothingness, condemned by some betrayal. That yet in that desolation, he was not without companions. For featureless on the abyss, invincible, moved monstrous intuitions. And from the depth and wide throat of eternity burned the cold, delirious chuckle of rare monsters beyond rare monsters, cruelty beyond cruelty."

It's all a bit plodding and belaboured for my taste, strong stuff for a lad. Agee, here and in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, just couldn't seem to fashion from his work a convincing world. So many different worlds and styles war with another within the book that one is scarcely surprised at all that he died with it incomplete.

Perhaps, as so many proclaim, this work is a masterpiece. But I myself just don't see it. There are some fine lines and paragraphs which, taken alone, are quite stellar. But plodding through this morass of death and religiosity, this mishmash of styles, does not comport with my experience of reading a masterwork.

Please, feel free to disagree.

My interest in this book came about after seeing a performance of Samuel Barber's opera "Knoxville Summer of 1915". Before the performance there was reading from "A Death in the Family" the book for which the opera was named. A few days later I purchased the book. When I began reading I immediately understood why Agee's writing would inspire such a beautiful piece of music. No, the book is not perfect. It is tedious and repetitive in spots and some parts just don't work, but it is some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. Agee does a wonderful job of capturing the world from a child's point of view: the almost dream-like descriptions of the Rufus' environment; the love and trust he has invested in his parents,in God and in the world; the sleepy sense that time is moving slowly for him etc. I believe the book is well worth the read despite the rough spots. As another reviewer pointed out the book was unfinished at the time of the author's death, and I believe this certainly accounts for many of the rough spots. It also offers a unique chance to see a published novel as somewhat of a work in progress and to learn something about the writing process. This is one of my most cherished books.

I do not know much about James Agee's personal history, but one wonders whether there was a degree of biography in this profound account of a family torn apart by an untimely death. The time and setting certainly fit with Agee's own upbringing. In any event, he poignantly captures the conflicting emotions of a wife who is trying to cope with the loss of her partner and mate in his prime, and how to reconcile that loss with her strong, self-effacing religious beliefs. The church, or religion in general, is not given a good face in this work, particularly in the guise of the Catholic Father, and in the struggle that Mary undergoes in trying to be strong and suppressing her emotional grief, in the name of that religion. I was appalled by the stern and unforgiving body language and words conveyed by the priest towards the young children who had just been given news of their father's death. His actions and attitudes may be a sign of those times, but the reactions of the children towards the priest, of guilt, shame and conflictedness, when all they should have felt was comfort and consolation, demonstrates the type of stern and unyielding religious arrogance that is at the heart of this story. Obviously, religious conflict had a long and divisive, in some senses unspoken, history in the family profiled here. Those differences exploded after the tragedy occurred. Also, the reactions and feelings of Rufus in particular, and also his younger sister, and his sense of pride and accomplishment in telling of his father's death to his schoolmates, is shocking, yet real. A child cannot adequately come to terms with the finality of death, and perhaps the saddest line in the book is Rufus pondering whether news of his father's death might prompt some of his schoolmates (who he obviously feels intimidated by and fearful of) to share their lunches with him. His reactions are bewildered, and his mother is unable to console him or help him cope with the devastation of his father's death, with she herself struggling with whether to grieve or praise God. This is a very profound work and while parts of it were difficult to access - some of the large parts in italics - the emotion was raw and real. It is a story I will remember for a long time.

This novel contains some of the most exquisite writing I have ever encountered. For those who enjoy the tender, glowing realism of authors such as William Maxwell, Marilynne Robinson or even Willa Cather, this novel will truly resonate. But A Death in the Family is more than just impressive writing - it is also the truly well crafted story of grief and loss told through the eyes of a series of family members. I read this in college and recall liking it, but the addition of the new pages brings the work into its own. From my understanding there are three distinct added sections - including the prelude. Admittedly, these added sections do not fit seamlessly into the narrative structure, but they each fit in arguably well with the tone and spirit of the work. It was quite obvious, at least to me, that Agee intended these incorporate these pages in the novel, but was unable to do so. (He died before the novel's completion.)

The plot, itself, is simple: the naked reactions of a family to the unexpected death of a loved one. But the amazing aspect of this is Agee's grasp of voice and perspective as the narrative moves from one voice to the other. We hear from the spiritually questioning wife, the pathetic, alcoholic brother, the bewildered near-infant daughter and Rufus, the infinitely interesting five-year-old son. Anyone who has actually experienced a death in the family will identify freely with at least one of the characters. Rufus is particularly fascinating in his struggle to understand the situation. He experiences the very real, yet rarely discussed, emotions such as pride for being the center of attention, boredom at not being allowed to go anywhere, and exasperation at his little sister. He is endearingly human - as are all the characters, really.

Since this is hardly a "new" novel, I will devote the most time to discussing this particular edition. It begins with the stunning addition of "Knoxville, Summer 1915" which just may be one of the most beautiful and effective prose poems in the English language (By the way, if you're as taken with Agee's prose poem as I was you might want to listen to the fabulous Barber setting of it for soprano and orchestra. I highly recommend the EMI Michael Tilson Thomas conducting and Barbara Hendricks, Soprano although the Eleanor Steber version is beautiful as well.) The next is a darker, more surreal passage telling the story of a boy (Rufus, son of Jay) and the quasi-anthropomorphized darkness. It is at once touching, chilling, endearing and unquestionably effective. But the final added section is, by far, the strongest in terms of narrative. It is essentially two stories of Rufus: one, in which he suffers at the mercy of grammar-school bullies and one in which he meets his great-great-grandmother. Like the other added passages, Rufus' stories by no means move the action forward, but the section does add depth and insight into his character.

A Death in the Family is a beautiful novel that is not merely a good read, but an experience to savor. On the "downside", the novel is placid and gracefully paced - honestly not much happens - but it is also heart-wrenchingly beautiful. If you're looking for a thriller this is certainly not it. Nor is it exactly comforting. Instead it contains a delicate spirituality of its own. It's a work of depth and beauty that is easy to enjoy.

This book is one of those classics you've never heard of. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. I've had it on my shelf for a while. I probably would have had a completely different perspective on it had I read it six months ago. Recently, one of my best friends died in a freak bike accident. I'm not sure what made me decide to read this book now-if I was looking for insight, answers, or just trying to relive it again. I definitely relived it. I suppose anyone who has ever lost a loved one suddenly could relate to many parts of this story. But for me, the book was eerily similar to my own experience. It's about a man, Jay Follett, a father of two, who dies one night in a car crash. Through the eyes of Jay's wife, his son, and his brother, Agee paints an incredibly moving picture of a family struggling under the weight of Jay's death. By switching views, he blends innocence, anger, tenderness, and love in a way that, somehow, conveys all these emotions at once. I feel like I lived this story two months ago, and everything about it rang true to me. There were no answers to help explain anything, but this book is a beautiful articulation of what it's like to suddenly have life turned inside out in the worst way. And the opening chapter is one of the most touching I have ever read.

I don't normally like sad stories, but this novel had a so many beautiful lines that it deserves the high praise it has received. Here are a few of them--what passion!

I hope my efforts at finding these wonderful lines makes your reading of my review worthwhile:

"Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and its almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember" (p. 94).

"'Look at me, Poll,' he said. She looked at him. `That's when you're going to need every ounce of common sense you've got,' he said. `Just spunk won't be enough; you've got to have gumption. You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is especially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice. You've got to keep your mind off pitting your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. You've got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they've come thought it and that you will too. You'll bear it because there isn't any choice--except to go to pieces. You've got two children to take care of. And regardless of that you owe it to yourself and you owe it to him. You understand me'" (p. 148-149).

"One by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved" (p. 201).

"On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there....They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds....By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away" (p. 15).

Highly recommended.

James Agee's writing just does something to me. As I read his books, I go back and forth between loving and loathing what I'm reading--I finish his books with a vague feeling of disappointment--and then for YEARS afterward I can't stop thinking about them.
It happened to me first with "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," and it's happening again with "A Death in the Family."
"A Death in the Family" tells the story of a small Catholic family affected by the sudden death of their father/husband/brother-in-law/son-in-law/et cetera. The first half of the book examine several different characters as they gather around the soon-to-be-dead-man's old and suffering father. For all that time it seems as if the death alluded to by the book's title will be the death of the man's father. Instead, the man himself dies in a car accident on the way back home from his sick father's. The book flashes back to the childhood of the dead man's son, and hovers around many of the book's characters, seeming almost indecisive as to who it's going to be about, seeming nebulous and atemporal. The wife. The kids. A preacher. A neighbor. A sibling. At times the story feels scattered and unfocused, but the writing is always so beautiful that it the story almost doesn't seem to matter, and the vagueness seems to match the confusion that comes after the sudden death of a close loved one.
The book deals well with the themes of death and loss and family relations and grieving and God and religion, and James Agee writes masterfully about the way children think. His descriptions of things and emotions are dead on, and his occasional experimental passages (like the man starting his car, and the sounds it makes for ten minutes) are a delight.
If the author had not died early of a sudden heart attack, and had lived to finish the book's editing himself, I bet it would have been even better. I recommend this and any James Agee book to every literate person out there.
It's something else, and it's something good.