Customer Reviews

The Gilded Age (1873) (Oxford Mark Twain)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't know if Amazon is lumping together the reviews of all the different editions for this book, but just in case, I read the Oxford edition, which is a beautiful hardcover facsimile of the first edition. I highly recommend those editions for any Twain work (the Library of America editions are also great). Anyway, being the first edition, there were a few typos here and there- missing punctuation or (this one happens several times) a question mark where a period or exclamation point was intended.

I know it's cliche to say "I love most Twain, but...", especially after only having read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but I have to say it. At least in my defense I've read quite a bit of Twain: Tom Sawyer Abroad/Detective, What is Man?, Punch, Brothers, Punch, all the McWilliams' adventures, you get the idea. I like it all, and I started this book convinced that I would like it too. It starts out well- later I found out that Twain wrote the first 11 chapters- and there are parts throughout that are funny, brutally satirical, and engaging. There are also plenty of soap opera-ish, for lack of a better phrase, tedious, and unnecessarily long parts. I want to reiterate the "soap opera" aspect because the love stories, which I completely lost track of due to lack of giving a #@!$, were painful to wade through. It's not fair to put too much blame on Warner, but his chapters are for the most part noticeably worse than Twain's. A good amount of the book could have been shaved off too, which would have improved it quite a bit (my edition is 575 pages).

I'm probably focusing too much on the negatives, especially because I have the advantage of knowing what a world class satirist Twain would become. This novel was only his beginning, but I have the luxury of comparing it to Letters From the Earth and his later works. Overall, despite its occasional charms, it just never really came together. I'd give it 3 1/2 stars if I could.