I knew about this book from some list of long American novels, but I got my first real taste of the novel from a pretty scathing James Baldwin review of it from an early essay collection. He revised his review when Ross Lockridge died by suicide shortly after publication, but his revision is almost more scathing.
The review is somewhat unfair. I can’t say that this is a great novel in the sense of being a truly deep and earnest interrogation of its subject, but it is in a lot of ways. Mostly it’s fair to see this book as a kind of answer to Gone with the Wind, which has burned its way into the consciousness of American culture. If you know a white woman from the South who reads books, there’s a significantly more than zero chance that she will say Gone with the Wind is her favorite book. It’s a lot of things, but it’s also a deeply cruel and hateful book that does not mask its white supremacy and racism.
This book takes place in Raintree County, Indiana (which was a Union state during the war — and almost a near dictatorship too). Johnny is just about to graduate high school in the beginning of the timeline of the novel. The novel is not told in a straightforward manner, but in a series of flashbacks. The day it takes place is a kind of reunion of Civil War veterans and other townspeople gathered some thirty years on in celebration. As the day progresses, small moments trigger memories that give us the important moments in the past we need. The narrative technique of a sentence beginning in the present, and shifting to the past on the turn of a single word gets overused here, but it’s an interesting way to send us to the past. And more importantly, it doesn’t give us the past in order, which is good. It’s not Faulkner, but it’s not nothing.
The novel covers several other important parts of Johnny’s life. The technique for the most part offers up the effects of certain events and time periods and his life first and then later fills in the details. What this often means is that we’re in the present in the 1890s, and we become aware of something, but it’s not until much later is it explored and made sense of. So for example, we learn in 1890 that Johnny is married to a woman 18 years his junior. Well this is a surprise given that early in the novel we know he’s deeply infatuated by a classmate, and we also know that he marries a woman who is visiting from the South. So this new information is jarring. It takes several hundred pages before all the details are sorted out. The same thing happens when we know that Johnny fights in the Civil War, but we don’t get his experiences for a long time, even covering several periods of his life after the war first.
These narrative techniques are quite strong, especially given how the book discusses an individual life against the mass of history. It’s a deeply existential book at times, in which the focus on Johnny purposely inflates the scale of the story, while the actual novel often (and Johnny’s indirect discourse does this as well) undercuts that same scale.
For whatever flaws the book does have, being a little hokey and sentimental at times, I do think it’s made up with its real wisdom and insight into American life. It’s a very strong rendering of the historical aspect of the story especially. The book also tries (and falls short of doing justice) to deal with the question of race throughout and I think effectively portrays the indifference and hypocrisy of white Liberalism (well, progressivism here) to not adequately care, understand, or handle race, even while ostensibly espousing sympathy. In a lot of ways, there’s some proto-Atticus Finch in Johnny here. It’s a bit of a mess at times, but it’s the right kind of mess.