Tuesday, June 3, 2014

One of Ours



One of Ours
by Willa Cather
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 NovelsPulitzer Prize

Death Comes to the Archbishop took me by surprise because it wasn't a novel I expected a female author to write. The main characters were pretty much all men, and the setting was in the American West.  As I started One of Ours, another Cather book, I was a little disappointed to see it as kind of a conventional coming-of-age story, of dreamer Claude trying to find meaning in his life in a farming community in Nebraska. It was almost like a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Then Claude gets sent off to World War I, and everything changes. I understand the criticism that Cather glorified the war, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Soldiers die, or are injured, even in just the journey by boat across the sea. We see the war destroy towns and destroy culture; this is especially epitomized by David abandoning the violin to join the infantry. But for Claude, the war is a way for him to escape the tedium of farm life, and it exposes him to worlds and people he could not have encountered otherwise. His connection to David is probably more important than his connection to his wife (who is barely mentioned in the second half of the novel); he's a person that Claude would not have met in peacetime. The dichotomy between the horror of war and the perverse freedom it affords the small-town solider is brought out well in this passage:
All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.
It's true - poor Willy wouldn't have had this elaborate funeral in Omaha, but he probably wouldn't have needed a funeral at all if he had stayed. Maybe I'm giving Cather too much credit for that unstated part of things, but I don't think so.

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