Customer Reviews

Raintree County (Rediscovered Classics)

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I had heard as a child about Ross Lockridge and his great novel "Raintree County." My great-grandmother, Bessie Shirk, was a local historian, writer and poetess in New Castle, Indiana. New Castle is in Henry County, or as Ross Lockridge named it, Raintree County.

Ross Lockridge spoke with Bessie often to gather historical data for his book as it pertained to the county. So when I finally picked up the book to read it when I was around 20, it was with some trepidation, from the standpoint that I was hoping it would measure up to everything I had heard. It did.

It's been called "the great American novel", "the great flawed American novel", "a masterpiece", "sweeping and epic", and so on. It is all those things.

From a technical standpoint, the book is too long. It could lose 200-300 pages and still be as good as it is. However, does one really want to lose any of Lockridge's language, discriptions, and evocation? Not I.

Much has been written about the book. But I really think you have to go to Raintree County and feel what it's like to be there. Stand up on a ridge looking over the Blue River valley on a summer evening just after the sun's gone down. There is a magical mysticism that radiates out of the land with a positive energy. What Lockridge did was to capture that energy in his book.

This isn't a must read for everyone, although I agree with some of the reviewers that it should be taught in schools, but only for advanced Lit classes. What Lockridge does--while brilliantly describing the historical period of pre- and post-Civil War America--is show us that human nature and behavior are constant throughout time.

In preface to my review, I have to say that my favorite writers are Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Boll, Arthur Rimbaud, etc.
Many of the reviews here have bandied about the name of Thomas Wolfe (whose "Look Homeward, Angel" was brilliant); and the comparison is richly deserved; but the most insightful comparison came from the person who said it reminded him of an American version of Tolstoy's "War and Peace".
I've actually read "War and Peace". Lockridge's "Raintree County" rises to that level--and, in my estimation--surpasses it. I love the Russians--Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. And I love Walt Whitman and Ross Lockridge for the same reason. They all have what the Spanish call "duende," what the American blacks clamor to express by the word "soul". These aren't weak, spineless, effete Victorians afraid of beauty, passion, shame and awkward emotions.
They cast light into the dark corners of the human soul and throw open man's collective experience for all to see--something rarely achieved in typically dryer Anglo-Saxon literature.
Ross Lockridge's "Raintree County" astounded me. It left me wondering how this great American genius has been ignored, neglected. The only thing I can think of is that Lockridge makes the fatal mistake of being honest, of writing too accurately about the time-period, of not lying and indulging in historical revisionism. As a result, spineless readers wince when the "N" word is used, or terms like "pickannies," "darkies" or various other period vulgarities are employed by despised side-characters.
For this reason geniuses like Booth Tarkington are banned and suppressed.
It's sad. They want to revise the past and make it "acceptable" for modern audiences. But if you sanitize, you gut, you neuter, you destroy the hard edges which give the time-period texture, verisimilitude. (I mean, if slaves were well-treated why did we fight the Civil War?) But modern hacks would have writers keep all profanities out of it, re-write it so that nothing crude or insensitive made its way in.
If you want lies, watch a Hollywood movie, read a trash novel; if you want genius, poetry, brilliant insights and literary talent, give "Raintree County" a try. Maybe, with enough of us protesting, the prude schoolmarms with tenure at universities will be nudged from their slumber and realize that they have neglected one of the titanic achievements of modern American literature.

Raintree County is the anatomy of a fall from Paradise-with all the Edenic metaphors placed in a fictional county in Indiana-and the process by which it is regained. The structure and scope of the book are extraordinary, a system of telling and suspension that turns one day into a hundred years, all hinged upon the American Civil War (and the allegorical death of the principal character). Like another great contemporary American novel, All The King's Men, Raintree County was built upon the wreckage of a failed epic prose poem. Also, like Robert Penn Warren's glittering classic, Ross Lockridge's best-selling masterpiece deals with a gifted primary character caught up in the vortex of human history (though Penn Warren was more interested in the problem of power than he was in the cataloging of the life of Huey Long).

Raintree County should be a standard of 20th Century American literature. It is perhaps the greatest novel ever written. I'm mystified as to why it doesn't make Random House's Top 100 Novels List. I think in all honesty that Raintree County is too straightforward, too compassionate, too wise, too loving, too optimistic, too gently humorous, and too accessible to please the moldy and myopic listmakers. Really "great" books, as everyone knows, are dry game puzzles, smug literary fogs, brutal crayon travelogues, or ancient misanthropic sphinxes that museum directors and tenured professors of the academies alike can dust off occasionally without fear of ever having to update their pamphlets.

The texture style and meter of this work is astoundingly lyrical yet clear. To wit: "The world is still full of divinity and strangeness, Mr. Shawnessy said. The scientist stops, where all men do, at the doors of birth and death. He knows no more than you and I why a seed remembers the oak of twenty million years ago, why dust acquires the form of a woman, why we behold the earth in space and time. He hasn't yet solved the secret of a single name upon the earth. We may pluck the nymph from the river, but we won't pluck the river from ourselves: this coiled divinity is still all murmurous and strange. There are sacred places everywhere. The world is still man's druid grove, where he wanders hunting for the Tree of Life."

As long as I have a mind, I won't forget this profound and wonderful book or the characters who inhabit it: Perfessor Stiles with his pince-nez and Malacca cane, the cigar-chewing bighearted phony senator from Indiana, Garwood Jones, sweet Nell Gaither, the dark lost and deranged Susannah Drake. Carefully researched (it took seven years to write), it is also an excellent freshener on historical events of the nineteenth century, especially the Civil War. Contained within, for all you philosophiles, is the added bonus of cogent and detailed arguments for free will over predetermination, the triumph of spirit over matter, a solution to the riddle of the Many and the One, an explanation of the Word, and many more.

Born four years before J.D. Salinger, who still breathes at this writing, Ross Lockridge Jr. ended his life by carbon monoxide poisoning March 6th, 1948, two months after the publication of his one and only novel. He was thirty-three. He left behind a wife and four children. His second son, Larry, five years old at the time of his father's death, has written a book (Shade of the Raintree) attempting to explain what he calls "the greatest single mystery in American letters." He largely blames success in combination with a "biological (possibly genetic) predisposition to depression" along with "suicide-personality disorder (narcissistic)." It's easy to see why a John Kennedy O'Toole battering his manuscript (Confederacy of Dunces) against the unbreachable ramparts of Harcourt Brace and Get Lost, might do himself in (and then of course win a Pulitzer). But to receive a Harvard scholarship, publish an immediately successfully and lavishly acclaimed book which wins several major prizes including an MGM contract, and then to take your life as a proclaimed lover of life and a protector of four children, is a riddle beyond the ken of my meager imagination.

Raintree County is sweeping in scope, almost 1100 pages long, and yet it pulls the reader through it with prose so compelling that one would have to be struck dead to lay the book down unread.

Lockridge tells the story of John Wickliff Shawnessy, a child of his age, growing up in ante-bellum Indiana. Told in a series of flashbacks, the novel opens on the Fourth of July 1892, when Shawnessy is 53. The holiday's focus is Shawnessy's reunion with old pals Cash Carney, U.S. Senator Garwood Jones, and Professor Jerusalem W. Stiles.

As Lockridge takes the reader through the events of this day, Shawnessy's friends arrive and depart, each evoking for him memories of his early years. Through this prism the reader is immersed in images of pre-Civil War rural America, the upheaval of the conflict, America's 1876 Centennial celebration, and the excesses of the Gilded Age. Shawnessy passes through it all, "life's young American", a scholar, a romantic, a poet, and an athlete.

Lockridge's imagery and descriptive power are truly matched to an author seeking to sculpt the Great American Novel. His evocative use of language is almost unsurpassed among modern American writers - only Thomas Wolfe approaches him. His characters are powerful and will stay with you always, lingering almost palpably like the memories of earliest childhood.

Curiously, only Nell Gaither, Shawnessy's lifelong flame, fails to march from the pages along with the other denizens of Raintree County, Indiana. Suzanna Drake, Nell's rival for Shawnessy, is a beautiful, brazen, and tormented child of the South. Garwood B. Jones, future U.S. Senator, is Shawnessy's boyhood foil, a garrulous and wickedly charming rake. And Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles is the rake-thin, brilliant and corrupted itinerant who lit for two years in Raintree County as sole preceptor and administrator of the short-lived Pedee Academy.

Come to this book when you are young and it will never leave you. As Lockridge noted on the flyleaf: "Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County. You will hunt it on the map, and it won't be there."

When averring that Raintree County is such a "Good" book, I find myself searching for words to accurately convey my meaning. The lyrical gift of Mr. Lockridge is "good," though not great as is the case with the brilliant Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist his writing most resembles. The story, complete with flashbacks, is engaging through all its over 1,000 pages. The philosophical sections are good as well, and the "Perfesser" Stiles is one of the most comically and wittily astute Menckenesque characters in all of American fiction.

One thing that I certainly do NOT mean by "good" is that the book is some sort of sentimental whitewash of American history and archetypal American characters. They are presented here in all their selfishness, avarice and mean-spiritedness. Yet, the novel ultimately has such a Whitmanesque all-embracing quality that these human traits dissolve into the rich tapestry of the story, which I found a page-turner despite its length.

Ultimately, the novel of which this book most reminds me is not an American, or even English, one at all. It is Tolstoy's War And Peace. These books both narrate the human capacity for evil and good, for love and hate, the chaos caused by the greatest war either of the two countries had fought at the time, the enduring value of friendship, all spread out over a vast panorama of intricate relations. In short, Raintree County is America's most epic novel: Not the greatest perhaps, but the most epic.

But there's something more: At one point in the book (p. 934 in my edition) Shawnessy reflects that, "A human life had a dimension that wasn't perfectly understood." Through reading this book, one somehow comes away with the feeling that one has at least brushed against the boundaries of this mysterious dimension.---No small feat, this.

I read this in the Nineties when the original hardcover edition was reissued by the Book of the Month Club. I read ten pages or so every night before going to work on the night shift at the post office, so it took me months to finish it. I'm not well acquainted with classical literature-- I've never read Moby Dick, etc, etc-- but I think this is a great book. It has sort of a southern flavor, in my opinion, and reminds me a little of several other books by southern writers I also enjoyed-- All the King's Men, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and especially Gone with the Wind. It's about the same length as Gone with the Wind, and although it's not quite in the same class, is comparable in the way it creates a richly described world in roughly the same time period, filled with ordinary and very human but interesting people that you feel you know. It takes you inside this world, the story pulls you along, and you're sad when the book finally ends. They don't write books like this anymore. It says something that author Ross Lockridge was so consumed with the project and poured so much of himself into it, that when it was finished, he apparently felt he no longer had a reason to live.

"Raintree County" by Ross Lockridge, jr., which I first read when I was 14, is the best book I have ever encountered. No other book has ever impacted me in such sweeping, all-encompassing fashion. Lockridge's masterpiece novel is epic in scope and feeling, utterly magnificent. Midwesterners in particularly will be struck by its magic and eloquence. There is not a prosy sentence in all of its 1,000 plus pages. Since I found "Raintree County", all discussions/debates about "The Great American Novel" have been irrelevant. This is it. Lockridge sits next to Shakespeare on my bookshelf and in my heart.

You may have once wandered through an art gallery and
while walking between images both beautiful and banal
happened upon a painting unlike few you have ever seen before.
It was found placed in a more remote part of the exhibit
and poorly lit thus causing you to give it a brief glimpse.
At first glance, the quaint simplicity caused you to smile yet upon
a second look you noticed the unmistakable quality, the rich
shadings, the subtleties, the emotion upon the faces of the characters,
and within a short time you realized that the artist had captured the
very essence of humanity. Shades of life both light and dark and all
the hues in between, this is what Ross Lockridge has placed upon his canvass for
posterity. This is Raintree County.

Raintree County; a mythical place, a gentle and beautiful tale of an
age and culture that has long since been harrowed under and paved over.
A verdant and pastoral county whose heart is found at the crossroads of
two dirt roads, whose inhabitants are poised at the intersection between a young
and thriving republic and greatest wrong every allowed to fester within
its expanding frontiers. The sunny days of community existence intertwined
with the political complexities surrounding the greatest rift ever to divide a
nation. A portrait of the land and its people in the midst of life and the
trials and tribulations of life's inescapable vicissitudes.

Within the covers of this book are found the joys of love upon the banks of
a river, the excitement and pride of a community during the celebration of
Independence day, the pungent smells and prolific yet depraved lifestyle during
the last days of antebellum New Orleans, and the songs of the slaves in their
agony, joy, and uncertainty. An epic, a day in the life of a ordinary man and
how he came full circle-if that is indeed possible. A reminder of the nation and
her people who were deeply shattered by the violence of a Civil War.

Within the prose are whispers of Plato, Poe, and Shakespeare. Characters
of well developed intellect and humor coexist amid the turgid and the
unlearned. At its core is love, insanity, birth, death, family, war,
and a river that courses through the county to both nourish the smiles and
drain the bitterness. Indeed perhaps the "Great American Classic," and a
sadly overlooked book. Lockridge is of the same ilk as Wolfe, Faulkner,
and Emerson. It has been said that each of us contains a book. To have this
as your only book is a majestic feat. Raintree County can be analyzed at many
philosophical levels and I am sure subsequent readings will reveal a multitude
of lessons. To me, my first time just staying at the surface brought me
the great joy that a masterfully written novel must impart.

Whether this novel is great literature or not I cannot say, nor can I advocate it as fodder for the college lit class. The book is just so personal. Bares comparison with Tristram Shandy, Huck Finn, The Red Badge of Courage and even Light in August. High praise, indeed. Be prepared for what it dredges up in your past. I should mention that I grew up in Branch County.

This is a truly brilliant novel and I am just astounded that it isn't being taught in schools. It transported me, taught me, astonished and moved me. I've tried to get others to read it, but unfortunately they're usually put off by the length.