Customer Reviews

His Family (Large Print Edition)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ernest Poole's 'His Family' focuses on the latter year's of Roger Gale's life as he attempts to pursue his wife's dying wish: for him to live on in their children's lives. The children, three daughters (Edith, Deborah, and Laura), encompassed three different lives which Roger valiantly tried to embrace. Edith- committed to a family life with room only for her children. Deborah- committed to public service and the 'tenement children' in need of schooling. And Laura- committed to the "new world" and the modern woman.

Instead of succeeding at understanding any one of his daughters completely, he seems to connect with them each only moderately and only on a few, isolated occasions.

I am usually enamored by stories of a family growing old. This tale captured that nostalgia and sentimentality. However, while still pleasant to read, the story never seemed to grab me. As the first piece of literature to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (then referred to as the "Novel" award), I guess I was hoping for something more dazzling, or at least emotionally gripping (as were the two successive winners, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Age of Innocence).

In all fairness, though, the characters are generally likeable and believable, and Poole does an exceptional job of highlighting some familial dysfunction, illustrating that although your feelings and thoughts might be clear, the relative roles that people take in a family can force even the patriarch to act in ways other than he thinks best.

Until coming across his name in a list of Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction, I had never heard of Ernest Poole. My curiosity was awaken and I added his Pulitzer novel to my reading list. I searched all the neigborhing libraries for a copy but was unsuccessful, so had to purchase a copy from an out-of-print book dealer advertised on ... I found that my resolve to read the novel, as well as the unexpected expense in securing a copy, was well worth the effort.

The novel is set in New York City during 1913-15, just as war has erupted in Europe, and deals with the family of Roger Gale, a successful businessman. Gale is a widower who has raised, with varying success, three daughters. Each of the sisters is selfish: the eldest is overly concerned with her immediate family; the second is overly concerned with the social inequalities of the masses, and the youngest is overly concerned with pleasure and the accumulation of luxury; each is blind to anything that disturbs their own world view. The character of each of the three gives Poole full license to allegorize concerning the social ills of his day. The main conflict within the novel is that of the individual family contrasted against the human family, or the mass of immigrants that had recently transformed the City from urban gentility into a modern metropolis.

The strenghts of the novel are Poole's character development and his use of dialogue. Each of the major characters in the book are honestly drawn and become alive in the pages of the book: each acts and speaks as would be expected. The major flaw is Poole's overly rhetorical ending (common in novels of this period) and his irritating verbatim repetition of the theme of the novel: "you will live on in our children's lives." The reader is forced to endure this thematic recapitulation at least two dozen times. It is as if the author feared that his readers would not "get" his message and wanted to be sure that they ruminated on the question of immortality.

Although the book will appear to some contemporary readers as being "old fashioned" and dated in terms of technique and style, His Family offers an unique view into the life of an upper middle class family in the New York City of the early twentieth century. For anybody interested in the social history of America during one of its most dynamic periods, I would recommend this novel.

Poole's book tells the story of aging patriarch Roger Gale and the lives of his three daughters - Laura, with her reckless abandon and zest for life; Deborah, with her fierce devotion to the tenement schoolchildren she assists; and Edith, the mother of five whose entire world revolves around her children. Roger sees their lives change - some for the better, some worse - and how it affects his own life.

This is a wonderful story which reminds me at times of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, in that it encompasses the scope of life in early twentieth century New York, and the lives of the people who inhabit it. The descriptions are vivid but never too cumbersome; the characters are all very real, and the plot flies by. By the end, I came to care about what happens to these people, and found I was sorry when it was over.

This novel has the distinction of winning the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction. What were they thinking? Probably modern thoughts, inclusiveness, and realism. Told through the eyes of patriarch Roger Gale, the story concerns his three daughters: Edith, the devoted mother of five children; Deborah, a principal of a high school who is more interested in her students than in the man who loves her; and Laura, the "wild" one who marries, divorces, then runs off to Europe to remarry. Anyone reading the book back then probably could imagine herself as one of these women - they pretty much span the gamut of possibilities. It's actually a pre-modern "modern" novel, on the right track, but not able to fully realize the truly advanced writings of the twenties. Poole thought that portraying women as hedonists or social scientists was modern; it was, but his style is very old-fashioned, so that much of this comes across as overly melodramatic, even soap-operish. Poole was not the only author at this time to fail in this way; in fact, he might be among the better of the writers whose means of telling his story hadn't progressed as far as the story itself. Scott Fitzgerald's THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was only three years away.

"His Family" by Ernest Poole was published in 1917 and became the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1918. Though an interesting work, it falls short of his better known "The Harbor" which was published in 1915. The novel picks up on the story of Roger Gale in the later part of his life, well after his wife (Judith) had passed away, and it deals with Roger's relationships with his three daughters (Edith, Deborah, and Laura) as well as their relationships between each other and those important characters in their lives. Most of the novel is written from the viewpoint of Roger, although from time to time Poole switches perspective to someone else to give the reader a better understanding of their perspective.

Poole uses this novel to comment on the changing society of the times in which it was written. The three daughters represent three different aspects of women. Edith is a woman who is a wife and mother, completely devoted to her family and children. Deborah is a woman who is focused on her career, even to the exclusion of having a family of her own. Laura is a woman who is focused on herself and her own needs. Together these aspects seem to represent the whole of Roger's deceased wife Judith, and their arguments and disagreements with each other may well represent the internal struggle that women have.

The other key element to this story is the external forces and pressures which come to bear on the family. The illnesses, the tragic death of a loved one, the financial pressures, the Great War, and the social mores of the time all are factors which have an impact on this family. An interesting note with regards to the latter aspect is that the Pulitzer Prize for Drama was given out to the play "Why Marry?" (a.k.a. "And So They Were Married") by Jesse Lynch Williams which deals with much the same issue, though in a humorous way.

As with "The Harbor", "His Family" would probably feel slow moving to today's readers. One key difference between the books is that in "His Family", Poole noticeably revisits the same themes in this one, which feels forced and gives it a repetitive feel at times. As a result, I can not give this as high of a rating as the previous work, and instead would put it just slightly above average. It is difficult to judge whether or not this work should have received the first Pulitzer, as I am not sure what other works would have been considered, but this is certainly a decent novel when one keeps in mind the era in which it was written.

This is the very first of the Pulitzer Prize winners for literature. It is a portrait of life as it looked to those at the dawn of the new century. Roger is a widower with three adult daughters, each representing a different cultural norm of the time. First there is Edith, the eldest. She lives apart from Roger with her husband and five children. She represents the traditional values of family living of the time. Next, is Deborah a woman dedicated to the poor and unfortunates of the time, a social crusader pretty much in the mold of Jane Addams, more interested in making the world a better place than getting married to her doctor suitor. Last, is Laura his youngest daughter who is to become a woman of the world in the style that those looking back would recognize as the flapper girls of the 1920s. The characters are richly portrayed which is the strength of this novel.

This is the first fictional book that won the Pulitzer Prize. It goes on about Roger Gale and the lives of his 3 daughters who are grown. Deborah is a principal of a tenement school and gives all her waking time to the people of the tenements. We see that the early immigrants are a hard working, willing group of people that just need help getting started in a new life. Laura, who married during the story, is now wanting to divorce her husband. Apparently, he engages in extramarital affairs, and she does, too! Because it is ok for a woman to have sex for the sake of sex. Wow! 1900s! Compare to the issues we have today. Not yet finished, but it is just a story with little or no plot.

His Family is a very fine novel about widower Roger Gale's challenges in raising three distinctly different daughters during the social transformations of 1910s. Its extremely sympathetic portrayal of the plight of the rising tenement community never becomes preachy, and therefore is a much more effective account of NYC at that time, including the very first appearances of the new "monster" apartment buildings. The story is fairly linear and its thematic elements, i.e. what the characters "represent", often dictate the turns the plot has to make. This is alleviated by the extremely even handed approach that the author takes with his characters' viewpoints, even those with which he must have had great personal disagreement. Because of this even-handedness and empathy for each character, the plot isn't fit into some larger ideological or polemical framework that would remove any sense of organic development. Its a relatively breezy and gentle read that, while not nearly as detailed "The Age of Innocence" in its atmospherics, does conjure up a believable and bygone period, whose preoccupations remain relevant.

When you read this, it is important to consider that it was written in the early 20th century.

It is a story about a 60 year old widower who has done well in in pre-Great War New York. He has 3 daughters that mean the world to him and he struggles to keep his family together as the world becomes more modern.

His daughters are very different and he loves each of them for different reasons. Edith is the consummate mother who thinks only of her children. Laura is the socialite who lives the modern hedonistic lifestyle. Deborah is the crusader who truly cares about the world. Roger, the main character loves them all but just wants them to live in harmony.

This is a naive book that looks at philosophical questions in simplistic terms. The story is simple and the chracters are caricatures but again it was written during WWI so it's naivete is expected.

Ultimately, the book has a good heart at its center and I marginally recommend it but especially for those interested in that period in history.

One of my favorite Pulitzer winning pieces of fiction. The story of a late, middle-aged man who lives in NYC and maintains the family farm in New Hampshire. He learns about "modern" life from his 3 very different daughters, a liberal-minded teacher, a shallow socialite and a prudish housewife/widow.