His Family [Paperback]

Instead of succeeding at understanding any one of his daughters completely, he seems to connect with them each only moderately and only on a few, isolated occasions.

I am usually enamored by stories of a family growing old. This tale captured that nostalgia and sentimentality. However, while still pleasant to read, the story never seemed to grab me. As the first piece of literature to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (then referred to as the "Novel" award), I guess I was hoping for something more dazzling, or at least emotionally gripping (as were the two successive winners, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Age of Innocence).

In all fairness, though, the characters are generally likeable and believable, and Poole does an exceptional job of highlighting some familial dysfunction, illustrating that although your feelings and thoughts might be clear, the relative roles that people take in a family can force even the patriarch to act in ways other than he thinks best.

The novel is set in New York City during 1913-15, just as war has erupted in Europe, and deals with the family of Roger Gale, a successful businessman. Gale is a widower who has raised, with varying success, three daughters. Each of the sisters is selfish: the eldest is overly concerned with her immediate family; the second is overly concerned with the social inequalities of the masses, and the youngest is overly concerned with pleasure and the accumulation of luxury; each is blind to anything that disturbs their own world view. The character of each of the three gives Poole full license to allegorize concerning the social ills of his day. The main conflict within the novel is that of the individual family contrasted against the human family, or the mass of immigrants that had recently transformed the City from urban gentility into a modern metropolis.

The strenghts of the novel are Poole's character development and his use of dialogue. Each of the major characters in the book are honestly drawn and become alive in the pages of the book: each acts and speaks as would be expected. The major flaw is Poole's overly rhetorical ending (common in novels of this period) and his irritating verbatim repetition of the theme of the novel: "you will live on in our children's lives." The reader is forced to endure this thematic recapitulation at least two dozen times. It is as if the author feared that his readers would not "get" his message and wanted to be sure that they ruminated on the question of immortality.

Although the book will appear to some contemporary readers as being "old fashioned" and dated in terms of technique and style, His Family offers an unique view into the life of an upper middle class family in the New York City of the early twentieth century. For anybody interested in the social history of America during one of its most dynamic periods, I would recommend this novel.

This is a wonderful story which reminds me at times of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, in that it encompasses the scope of life in early twentieth century New York, and the lives of the people who inhabit it. The descriptions are vivid but never too cumbersome; the characters are all very real, and the plot flies by. By the end, I came to care about what happens to these people, and found I was sorry when it was over.