This almost completely autobiographical novel details the impact of a father's accidental death on a Knoxville, TN family. The parents were modeled on Agee's own; the father is a warm-hearted agnostic who takes his young son to Charlie Chaplin Silents and local bars. The mother, outwardly pious but tormented by doubt, is much more reserved. Various members of both sides of the extended family make appearances and the story concludes with the funeral, where the presiding minister refuses to perform the full Church service for an unbaptized soul.
Agee is, or was, considered one of the tragic figures in American letters,
an immensely talented young author hiding his light under Henry Luce's
bushel and doing hackwork for Fortune magazine. Oddly enough, his
journalistic account of Depression era workmen, Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, is now considered a masterpiece. Meanwhile, this unfinished
novel, despite winning the Pulitzer, is rightly considered to be a fairly
standard Southern slice-of-life melodrama. It is most interesting
for the insight it offers into Agee's troubled relationship with his mother,
indeed one of his biographers believes that in his screenplay for The African
Queen he wrote Bogart as himself as Hepburn as his mother--think about
that one.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (C)
