I remember exactly when I first heard of James Agee's A Death in the Family. It was in Ithaca in 1958. The late Edward Ruhe, who was then a young instructor in English, stopped me on the street and asked if I had read it. He said I must, and, obedient lad that I was, I immediately purchased a copy. I can't remember much from my fifty-years-ago reading, except that I was put off by the novel's long italicized flashbacks and by what I regarded as its excessively intimate tone, which I then judged to be sentimental and false. But I've now re-read the novel. It's authentic, it's emotional, and it's so very American. I'm very glad to have had a chance to revise my earlier opinion. Perhaps I was too young. It's curious that I didn't connect Agee to the autobiographical poets that I was then reading, for the ground that Agee covers was then being explored by Lowell and Snodgrass and Roethke and of course by Sylvia Plath.
It's a novel not only about death (it's told through the observing eyes of Rufus Follet, the six-year-old whose father dies in an automobile accident) but about the details of American life. There's very little in the way of plot, but Knoxville in 1915 is wonderfully evoked, mostly through concrete images. It's very much a novel of things. Perhaps I'm especially conscious of this technique because I've been re-reading Flaubert. But in Flaubert's novels, almost every object is laden with satirical significance (which is also the case -- to choose an American parallel -- in the novels of Mark Twain). Agee, however, loves the objects that he describes. Although there's puzzlement and mystery, there's not an ounce of satire or cynicism anywhere in A Death in the Family. Rufus Follet and Huck Finn -- it's not as unlikely a pairing as it might at first seem.
The facilitator of Agee's achievement is James Joyce. A Death in the Family could not have been written without the precedent of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But it's an American not an Irish portrait -- not as complex or as original, but fully as real as Joyce's. If an extraterrestrial visiting our lovely green planet wanted to understand the difference between Europe and America, he couldn't do better than read Portrait and A Death in the Family side by side.
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