My Ántonia is a book often assigned in school, and thereby often ruined. Teenagers pick up a book about nostalgia, about adult regret and longing for the land of lost content, and they realize they don't relate to any of this at all. How could they? They have none of the life experience yet that would make this resonate. So they find the book boring and therefore never pick it up again. And typically they end up concluding that literature as a whole is a recondite language inaccessible to them, or else a pretentious game in which pompous adults merely claim to find things interesting that are actually dull, and they are turned off reading for life. Thanks a lot, school!
But picking the book up for the first time in adulthood (or at least, for the first time with any serious intent of finishing it) one realizes at last what all the grownups were talking about. This is a truly beautiful book! This is one of the greatest books ever! Why? What is so great about it? Let me count the ways.
1.) Because it captures the ache of nostalgia and lost chances, the days of splendor in the grass and glory in the flower and all that, without ever succumbing to sentimentality. It is reminiscent in this regard of Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" (which Julian Barnes and others have commended for its ability to maintain a consistently poignant tone without descending into tear-jerking); and it therefore makes sense that this was an author who influenced Cather quite a lot (in a memorable essay, Cather describes a chance encounter with Flaubert's beloved niece, with whom she enthuses about her devotion to her then-deceased uncle). Both works manage to convey the beauty of life all the better by never disguising its ugliness.
My Ántonia is not the heart-warming tale of life on the prairie one might have imagined it would be; it is a life on the prairie in which people commit suicide—leaving the gory evidence splattered on the ceiling above them; a world in which hired servants face the risk of rape; and people arrive in America from their home countries because they once fed a sleigh-full of wedding guests to a pack of wolves. But it is all the more effectively heart-warming for that very reason, because it is true and real.
2.) Because it has one of the most appealing narrators in fiction. Cather's creation, Jim Burden, is thoroughly honest and human about his own motivations and actions. He recounts to us all the ignorant and hurtful things he ever said; he shows us all his unheroic thoughts and unchivalrous deeds; he confesses without shame that he looked forward to the next crisis of death and mayhem on the prairie with a sense of excitement, and that the bloodcurdling tales of his neighbors' misdeeds (viz that feeding-the-bridal-party-to-the-wolves business above) filled him with a "painful and peculiar pleasure" (here it is further relevant perhaps that Cather told Flaubert's niece that her favorite among her uncle's works was the gruesome historical novel Salammbô, in which more than one critic has discerned a trace of sadism).
But Jim Burden is also one of the best and most admirable men in fiction, because he actually relates to women as friends, equals, and comrades. He is a kind of Rimbaud contemplating the "hell of women" and wishing them rid of the brutes and free to be his pal—but not merely to become his exclusive wife or lover. Jim Burden is an observer and admirer of people who manages to love them without that love ever turning into the darker need for possession. He is a true male pro-feminist, and perhaps (alas) it took a female novelist to imagine him into being. But even if Burden is fictional and represents an ideal few of us men reach, he is utterly convincing. As we've seen above, he is no faultless hero or knight.
More than that, he is also one of the saddest characters ever created. He makes one's heart ache, because he is always looking upon the life-drama of others from without. He is, in this regard, as touching as those other great nonparticipant narrators in literature—those of Alain-Fournier's The Lost Domain (a.k.a. Le Grand Meaulnes) or Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. He has his nose pressed to the glass of a window through which he can just see the glow of someone else's Christmas tree. He is like the unnamed reporter in Faulkner's novel Pylon whom he memorably analogizes in one scene to a "friendly and lonely ghost peering timidly down from the hayloft at the other children playing below." In short, he is alone, and I love him.
And that brings us to point 3.) The book manages to wring the heart and portray emotion between its characters of unprecedented depth and passion, without any of these characters even once entering into anything that could be described as a conventional relationship with one another. In this way, it is far truer to life than most other books, since life is constantly overflowing social forms. Here, in this book, the most intimate relationships are the platonic, occasionally flirtatious, but ultimately unconsummated affections that Jim forms with the women he admires. These kinds of friendship find no place in the more conventional novel. But here, in heroic contrast, Jim loves Ántonia, but he never marries her or becomes her sweetheart, and in the end he casually befriends her husband, without fuss.
The book is full of people who decline in this way to participate in the approved forms of heterosexual monogamy—Lena Lingard, who declares that she will never marry, and who means it and acts upon it, despite Jim's and others' initial disbelief. "I like to be lonesome," she declares, adding that her life on a farmstead in the country turned her off family life for good. Ántonia, who raises a perfectly happy and healthy first child out of wedlock, then gets married to someone else and adds more children to her family, without ever allowing the first to be ostracized. Miss Harling, who manages her father's business and displays no interest in finding a husband.
Then there are the others who do so participate in the prescribed social roles—and regret it. Jim Burden, who is unhappy with his marriage and never has any children of his own. And even Ántonia's eventual husband, who appears to be happy with his large family, nonetheless resents the isolation of his life in the country. He prompts Jim to wonder "whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two."
Nearly all the characters in the novel, therefore, in some ways end up "lonesome," whether gladly and by choice, or resentfully and by fate. There is no romance plot in My Ántonia—at least not any that lasts through the whole arc of the novel. And yet, seldom has there been a novel more thoroughly and completely imbued with sincerely-felt love: love, moreover, between a man and a woman.
If we live in a societal moment, and I hope we do, when people are starting to recognize that human relationships and affections—including some of those of the very deepest hue, that leave the most lasting memories in life—take forms that find no place inside the bounds of conventional heterosexual monogamous pairings, or even of romantic or sexual couplings of any kind—if all of that is true, I say, then My Ántonia is the book for our time.
Just, please god, don't read it in school! Don't spoil it for yourself! Wait, until you are old enough, and it finds its way to you!
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