Customer Reviews

The Magnificent Ambersons (Modern Library Classics)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I hate to admit it, but if this novel had not been included in the Modern Library's Top 100, I probably would have never picked it up. I have never been a fan of socially conscious literature, and I anticipated a novel in the style of William Dean Howells - full of cardboard characters, most of whom would be down trodden and hopeless, or rich and ruthless, and enough moral pronouncements to make me feel guilty for at least a day or two. Thankfully, I let the Modern Library editors convince me that the book was worth reading.

The novel is set during the dawning of the twentieth century and concerns itself with the impact of mechanical innovation on the bucolic life styles of a midwestern town. As the novel opens, the gulf between prominent families and their aristocratic lives are contrasted with those in society whose main purpose it is to support this luxurious and frivolous existence. The aristocracy is personified by the Amberson family, wealthy and prominent, and particularly by George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled grandson of the family's founder. He is unable to understand that a great revolution is taking place around him, that the lifestyle he has always known is soon to become anachronistic as those people with talent, luck and a little capital will soon surpass him in wealth and prestige. Although he has the talent to join this new mechanical age, he prefers to be and to remain a gentleman and to believe that "being things" is far superior to "doing things."

As the midwestern town grows and expands and becomes more and more industrial, and even as the Amberson family compound becomes surrounded by apartment buildings and factories, George is unable to accept the fact that he and his family are becoming irrelevant. As the town quickly turns into a dirty and depressing city and the Amberson fortune begins to crumble, he still dresses for dinner, still drives a horse and cart, and still holds to his standards "as a gentleman." Tarkington weaves in subplots involving the love story of George's widowed mother and the Henry Ford-like Eugene Morgan as well as George's own romantic involvement with Morgan's daughter. These stories add a subtle ironic twist to the narrative as well as allowing the author to delve deeper into the consciouness of his spoiled (but sympathetic) antagonist.

Although there is some of Howells influence in this book, Tarkington does not succumb to the artistic sterility of his mentor. This author is able to tell an interesting story and to develop characters that are not only realistic, but invoke an emotional response from the reader. And although the ending seems to me a little contrived and more in keeping with some of the "realist" writers of the early twentieth century, Tarkington's novel is, in the end, successful and offers an enjoyable reading experience.

"Magnificent" is the word to describe this book. Epic in scope, it follows the rise and fall of the Ambersons as the spoiled and arrogant George Minafer grows up. I enjoyed the somewhat melodramatic story and found many parallels between these times and the world of today. The plot is emotional and powerful, and it is easy to see why Orson Welles would have wanted so much to make it a film.

What makes the book especially interesting, however, is Booth Tarkington's ability to understand and describe the changes going through America at the time. The setting is more than just a "character;" it dictates the circumstances of its inhabitants. It provides the foundation for the way of life they must live. This is not only a tale of George and his family falling from great heights, but also a record of how a small town grew into a city, how automobiles changed the landscape in which we live, how people were forced to adapt to this unsympathetic setting between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He writes mainly from George's point of view, so there is a romantic, nostalgic vision of how things once were, but Tarkington is not fooled into believing that technological and social change has not made some things better, just as he isn't fooled into thinking they haven't made some things worse. What the Ambersons saw as tragedy and loss, others saw as opportunity. I percieved no moral lesson or message; this book is about the tragedy and loss of a proud clan unable to comprehend that in an industrial age, life was no longer static.

(There is also a good lesson in here on the risks of not diversifying your investments!)

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel tells the story of the decline of the once magnificent Amberson family, the leading family of a Midwestern city at the turn of the century.

George Amberson Minafer is the spoiled young heir to the Amberson fortune, but America is now entering the automobile age & the conservative Ambersons are ill equiped to deal with the rapid changes.

Tarkington intertwines two tragic love stories with the theme of the Ambersons decline and produces one of the really great forgotten novels that I've ever read. Perhaps the book got lost because of the great screen version that Orson Welles produced, but whatever the reason, this is a book that deserves a wider audience and Modern Library is to be applauded for including it on the list.

GRADE: A

This magnificent, humorous and fanciful book -- a precurser to Gatsby -- is timeless in its central meaning: parents spoil their children and children eventually must learn to unspoil themselves.

Set in the midwest around the turn of the century, Tarkington introduces the reader into a world ruled by the richest family in town: the Ambersons. A portrait of victorian excess, the Amberson's have everything and then more. Their house is the town's feudal castle. People on the street discuss their every move.

Born into this world is Georgie Minafer, Tarkington's cartoon monster of spoiled and ego-ridden pomposity, who head is as swollen and vacuous as a balloon.

Georgie not only possesses every material item he could ever desire: he also is surrounded by remarkble women: his stunning and angelic mother who would sacrifice anything for his happiness and his wise and beautiful girlfriend Lucy who loves him despite knowing better.

Things change, the town becomes a city and absorbs the Amberson palace in a cloud of soot. One by one Georgie's protectors disapear and the magificence of the Amerbersons and everything he took for granted vaporizes like a dream. This leaves Georgie to ponder what he had, and those who knew him in the good days to observe from afar.

Tarkington masterfully weaves humor, history and gripping emotion in this book. It remains a rewarding book after more than 80 years in print, largely because its meaning is eternal.

Who would have thought that a novel from 1918 would be such a page turner? Not to generalize, but there aren't many books pre-1920 or so that I've been unable to put down. Until "The Magnificent Ambersons."

Covering a span of roughly 20 years in the lives and fortunes of the Amberson/Minafer family, Booth Tarkington uses the fall of the family from its privileged social standing as a symbol of the blurring distinction between classes that took place in the country's urban areas at the beginning of the 20th Century. The Ambersons live in a stately mansion, separated from the outside world by vast lawns and gates, and gradually watch their secluded neighborhood overrun by cheap apartment buildings, increased traffic and pollution. What Tarkington does, nearly 80 years before the actual phrase came into common usage, is address the problems associated with urban sprawl.

The book has two of the most colorful characters ever put down on paper: Georgie Amberson Minafer, the spoiled brat protagonist who fights most fiercely to retain the family's position as one of the most distinguished in the city; and Aunt Fanny, the manipulative spinster who doesn't understand just how serious the consequences of her gossiping and meddling (to her merely distractions from the boredom and tedium of her life) can be.

I surprisingly felt much sympathy for Georgie. He can be odious at times admittedly, and more than once you want to see him slapped silly, and at one point in the novel you honestly begin to wonder if perhaps he's mentally ill, so extreme are the measures to which he will go in the sake of what he thinks is protecting his mother's good name. But by the time the novel ended, I couldn't help being won over by him. He's got an overbearing personality, but I shared his opinion of the ugliness he sees sprouting up around him. His obsession with a time gone by springs from naivete, and as he grows over the course of the novel, he experiences a shift of priorities, as all adults do as they become adults.

In many ways, Tarkington's novel is about dealing with maturity and the occassional disillusionment that can accompany it. There's a beautiful passage in which Georgie's uncle George (Georgie's namesake) explains that youth can never understand the triviality of the things it takes so seriously (status, passion, success) and will never be able to understand it until youth has become middle age. And Georgie's grandfather, responsible for the wealth of the family, realizes on his deathbed the ultimate uselessness of all the material goods he has acquired over a lifetime.

If you would like to see a good film version as a companion piece to the novel, see the 1942 Orson Welles version rather than the A&E version from a few years ago. Welles' film is butchered and as a result tells only a very truncated version of the story, but it gets the tone just right, and Agnes Moorehead's dead-on portrayal of Fanny is one of cinema history's highlights. The A&E adaptation, meanwhile, is dreadful.

But please don't let either of these film versions take the place of the novel itself. It lingers in the mind long after the final page has been turned.

If you take The Modern Library's list of the 100 greatest books of the century, and turn it on its head, so that "The Magnficent Ambersons" drops two worthless zeros, the list suddenly becomes much more meaningful. (Though you'd still have a hard time justifying Ulysses's presence even at number 100).

"The Magnificent Ambersons" is too often forgotten completely (rather like its brilliant author), but it is a deep and thought-provoking book nevertheless.

A reviewer below was of the opinion that nobody would enjoy this book who was not a fan of early 20th-century period pieces. I disagree. This is a book primarily about human beings and human nature, and as such its theme is universal and timeless. Certainly it has a setting (early 20th-century Indiana), but what book about people does not? And how many people are not influenced, as the Ambersons are, by the events and movements of their time? This is to be expected in any book. But this book focuses mostly on individuals, and their strengths, weaknesses, characters and behaviour, to which readers from any age can relate.

Here is a fascinating book. We start off essentially empathizing with the scornful people who look on at the main character, root root rooting for his demise. As the story progresses it is difficult to not go on truly hating George Amberson Minifer, if only because of a natural distaste for the self-important and the snobs that roam around unenchanted but clearly not aware of this. However, as the story reaches its end, I found it impossible to not actual feel something for this jerk, for his oblivious family and more all the mistakes they made that were obvious to everyone except for themselves. Perhaps this is the truest merit of this wonderful book: such a capable and compassionate understanding of even the worst people (to my mind) that we cannot help but humanize the villains and grow to understand some part of their desperation and yearning for what could never be.

A wonderful, truly affecting novel that will linger for a very long time--

Set in the early 20th century, this is Booth Tarkington's classic novel about the decline of an American family. The novel won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Major Amberson had established a family fortune by buying and selling land. His children become social drones. One son (unmarried) goes into politics. One daughter and son-in-law wait around for their inheritance. The other daughter marries Mr. Minafer, who has some success in business, but loses his money to bad investments. The main story is about George Amberson Minafer, the only grandchild, who is spoiled as a child and grows up arrogant with the assumption that he is from an upper class family and will never have to work.

The family are large frogs in a small puddle and, alas, fail to keep up with a changing society. They are left behind in the dust. The people George Minafer looked down upon become successful in the new industrial climate, while George's family fortunes decline. Eventually George finds he has to (gasp) find a job to support himself and an aunt.

The novel is slow reading, but is worth the effort. Many students, unfortunately, are like George, and would probably not like to make the effort. As a moral lesson, be careful who you insult. If your fortunes decline, you may end up working for them.

The Magnificent Ambersons is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a bygone age; a time when there were only two social classes, "gentlemen" and "riffraff," where ascots were worn to dinner and the horseless carriage was considered a passing fad. Set in a growing Midwestern town at the end of the nineteenth century, Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer winner (one of two, in fact) is the story of George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled and arrogant heir to the family 'magnificence'. Once the most important family in the rapidly growing town, the Ambersons are oblivious to their increasing irrelevance, and as industrialization and democratization take hold, little Georgie finds himself stubbornly maintaining his self-importance in the face of a changing era.

In spite of George's utter nastiness at times, Tarkington has somehow managed to portray him as a sympathetic character. As he bull-headedly marches through life defending the family name and honor, one cannot help but feel sorry for this anachronistic gentleman who believes that "being things is rather better than doing things." The disintegration of the Amberson way of life is inevitable but drawn out, and hot-headed young George manages to completely miss the foreshadowing that Tarkington skillfully employs.

The author creates conflict not only between George and the unworthy (just about everyone else), but also in the various subplots; George's tempestuous romance with the daughter of a local Henry Ford-like automobile engineer, his antagonistic relationship with his spinster Aunt Fanny, and his relationship to his doting, child-like mother. This secondary cast of characters is richly evoked, and their interactions are often heartbreaking. One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Magnificent Ambersons is Tarkington's clever dialogue, and his acerbic wit is amply sprinkled throughout the characters' various interactions. At times, the humor is laugh-out-loud funny, and will appeal most to readers who love the subtle cuts and parries of Gilded Age conversation.

I would likely never have picked up The Magnificent Ambersons had it not been included in the Modern Library's Top 100, and in fact was slightly surprised upon finishing the novel that it made the final cut (albeit barely, sliding in at number 100). While I found the book to be well-written, entertaining and evocative, I felt it lacked a more long-term resonance. While I thoroghly enjoyed it, I didn't find myself gripped by the book's ideas long afterwards. My only complaint was that the ending felt a bit abrupt. Regardless, Tarkington's ability to offer a subtle commentary on a vanishing era are part the reasons for his sustained relevance, and his influence on American Realist authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald is obvious throughout the novel. I will most certainly be investigating more of Tarkington's work, and highly recommend that readers discover for themselves whether Georgie gets his "comeuppance."

~Jacquelyn Gill

A Magnificent Book about the changing fortunes of social class in America in the period following the end of the Civil War to the early part of the 20th century, a time of rapid change in America. It examines three generations of an aristocratic mid-western family the Ambersons as they cling to the old ways and are "run over" (literally) by the rise of a new money industrialist class ("riffraff"). Written in 1918 by Tarkington who was born in 1868, just at the end of the Civil War, he lived and saw in person the changing fashions and changing way of life brought on by the industrial revolution: from small towns with horses to modern industrial cities with cars and factories. The Amberson family is a metaphor for a class of people who get their "come-uppance", as the path to success changes from heredity to meritocracy during the industrial revolution and its socially democratising effects in America.