W. D. Howells in the News
Monday, May 30, 2005
from the Los Angeles Times
[ . . . ] Postmodern theorists, promoting a fluid sense of identity, were only the latest step in unhinging art and discourse from any stable sense of the real world. Just as political upheaval left people physically insecure and globalization left them economically insecure, postmodernism was part of a complex of changes that left them feeling morally insecure, uncertain about who they were or what they really knew.
For some, there was a newfound freedom in all this. But many Americans today, sensing that the foundations of their world have crumbled, feel a deep nostalgia for something solid and real. Surrounded by a media culture, adrift in virtual reality, they seek assurance from their own senses. They turn to what John Dewey called "the quest for certainty."
I see evidence of this in my own field of literary studies, which has long been in the vanguard of postmodernism. In his book "After Theory," a widely discussed obituary for decades of obfuscation that he himself had helped to promote, Terry Eagleton mocks "a certain postmodern fondness for not knowing what you think about anything."
To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise. [. . . ]
From Newsday.com: Recommended reading
A lesser-known entry in the Americans-in-Europe genre, the school of novels ruled by Edith Wharton and Henry James, William Dean Howells' comedy of manners, "Indian Summer," (New York Review Books, $14) is as sublime as they come. As the title implies, this is a book about a season on the cusp, specifically the season of middle-age in the life of Howells' hero, Theodore Colville. A 40-year-old Midwestern newspaper publisher who finds himself in Florence after selling his business, Colville runs into another American, Lina Bowen, whom he knew years before as the intimate of a woman he loved who jilted him. Mrs. Bowen, now widowed, is spending the season in Florence with her young daughter, Effie, and a friend's 20-year-old daughter, Imogene.
It should be plain from that setup that Colville and Imogene fall for each other. Howells' description of this mutual infatuation is like listening to a melody that's a few beats off the rhythm. No one can quite surrender to the sweetness because no one really believes in it. From the moment Colville and Imogene 'fess up their feelings, they realize they're trapped.
In the finest line of her ace introduction, Wendy Lesser says, "Middle age ... is the period of life at which one first senses what it means to become a part of the past."
"Indian Summer" is not, however, a tragic novel. Ultimately, it's one of those rare works (like Ron Shelton's film "Bull Durham") about the deep, unexpected satisfactions to be found in compromise. [. . . ]
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
From the New York Sun (unfortunately, only paid subscribers can access much more than this):
Other than English majors and literary scholars, who reads William Dean Howells? If your project is 19th-century American fiction, then Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Crane, and the early Wharton and Dreiser head the list. Yet Howells wrote magnificent travel books (he was U. S. consul in Venice), and at least three novels that deserve their place in the canon. "A Modern Instance" (1882) is a shrewd and diverting study of a corrupt and womanizing Boston journalist, Bartley Hubbard; "The Rise of Silas Lapham" (1885) dramatizes the fate of a self-made Vermont businessman; "A Hazard of New Fortunes" (1890), set in New York City, reflects profound misgivings about rampant capitalism.
