Customer Reviews

The Fathers

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This is a tremendous work; I cannot fathom why it is not well known outside literary circles unless it is because it was the only novel of its poet/critic author. The style in which it is written is beautiful. The first person narrator gracefully tells a profound story which (to me) leaves lingering mysteries and does so without "trying too hard" or pretention. The story and the style in which it is written fuse into a haunting masterpiece. I have never sought a literary profession; however, I think that anyone who does so would learn a great deal from this book.

This novel is one of the best written in the United States. While it will delight conservatives for its tender and moving picture of a culture whose traditions and habits are being destroyed, readers of all political stripes will enjoy reading the Greek like tragic victory/fall of the utilitarian 'hero' of the novel. His story is that of modernity, and thus of us all.

I was alerted to this book through a Washington Post "rediscovery" book review of neglected, but worthwhile books of the past. As a long time resident of Alexandria, Virginia, I was intrigued by its promise of a local setting. The author makes excellent use of Old Town Alexandria, and local Northern Virginia settings. (Alexandria, Virginia was a Union held city in a state which became the Confederate capital, and was the scene of the first Union fatality of the war.
The author's use of actual surviving communities and even street names from Alexandria and nearby Fairfax County was quite interesting to this reader, though the actual story itself is a bit obtuse, and occasionally more literary than enjoyable.
A quoted reviewer's comparison to "Gone With the Wind"is not totally accurate. The setting is indeed the Civil War and a protagonist does bear some characteristics with Rhett Butler. But "Fathers" is certainly not the rousing adventure-love story of GWTW and may disappoint those who expect it to be.

[T]he dominating structure of a great civilized tradition is certain absolutes . . . by which people live, and by which they must continue to live
until in the slow crawl of history new references take their place.
-Allen Tate, Liberalism and Tradition

Man is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order to do.
-Allen Tate

During his lifetime, Allen Tate was considered by no less an authority than T. S. Eliot to be the best American poet of his generation. Yet today, the only one of his poems we really recall is Ode to the Confederate Dead, and even that has a whiff of impropriety about it. He wrote two well regarded biographies, but they're of the Confederate heroes Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. He was also considered an outstanding critic, but criticism has a pretty short shelf life, as each generation discovers authors anew. He was also a participant in and a founder of important literary movements--the Fugitives, the Agrarian movement, and the New Criticism. Yet there's a a certain stench about the politics of these groups, their celebration of Southern ideals sitting ill with the subsequent Civil Rights era. And if Mr. Tate's ambiguous position in regard to race weren't enough to doom him in modern eyes, he was also no gentleman in his treatment of his wife, the fine writer, Caroline Gordon, to whom he was apparently quite flagrantly unfaithful. Add to it all the unfortunate fact that regard for the Confederacy and the Ante-Bellum South has been co-opted to some extent by white supremacists and other idiots and it's surely no surprise that Mr. Tate's reputation has fared poorly.

With all this as baggage, the reader who comes to The Fathers, Mr. Tate's only novel, expecting some kind of gothic version of Gone With the Wind must be forgiven. Instead, while it is fairly Southern gothic, what Mr. Tate offers is a far more complex portrait of a young man, Lacy Buchan, who is torn between the world of his father, Major Lewis Buchan, representing the stereotypical Southern aristocracy, but paralyzed into inaction by the war, and George Posey, Lacy's brother-in-law, a modern man (for example, a capitalist) whose lack of ties to the chivalric tradition lead him to behave in an undisciplined fashion, eventually resulting in tragedy. Lacy's struggle then is to find a middle way, one that learns from and honors the traditions of his father, but which is capable of moving forward into the modern age that George presages, or perhaps into a better future, because tempered by tradition.

The novel is a tad opaque and overwrought for my tastes, but well worth reading.

GRADE : C+

This is quite simply the best novel ever written set in and around the Civil War.