My mother gave me this book because I like to read "trashy romance novels". This book sucked. I detested Magnolia's mother. I hated the racial slurs. The husband was a royal bastard. And the daughter treated Magnolia like a simpleton! But what can I say, she was close to it. Magnolia had no real personality and absolutely no backbone whatsoever. Although she was sweet and I admired how much the loved the river and the theater I could barely stand her at certain times in the novel. I had to force myself to finish the book. Although many of you may disagree with me and certainly the other people who gave reviews do. But I have a right to my opinion and decided that what I thought of this book should be up here to warn off others.

Although she is somewhat neglected today, for more than three decades Edna Ferber was considered one of America's premiere authors. While her work included short stories and theatre, she was most famous for her novels, most of which focused on strong women coping with errant men in panoramic settings. SHOW BOAT was one of her first great successes. Today the story is better known through its musical theatre incarnation and the two film versions the stage show generated, one in 1936 directed by James Whale and starring Irene Dunne and one in the 1951 directed by George Sidney and starring Katherine Grayson. But while the stage and screen versions have their charms, none really captures the epic nature of Ferber's novel, which is as much about America as it is about the story of post-Civil War show folk who ply their trade on "The Cotton Blossom"--a floating theatre that travels the nation's waterways, most particularly the mighty Mississippi.

The story concerns three generations of women: Parthenia Hawks, a ram-rod upright New Englander who heartily disapproves of her husband's decision to purchase a show boat and involve the family with actors, God forbid; her daughter Magnolia, whose fresh beauty eventually propells her fame as one of the most popular actresses on the river; and her granddaughter Kim, who becomes a Broadway star. But the backbone of the story concerns Magnolia's ill-fated love for ne'er-do-well gambler Gaylord Ravenal, a love that tests her strength to the last degree. Just as Magnolia has to change to meet her constantly shifting circumstances, so is the nation changing around her, gradually shifting from a rather innocent, rural society to a much more hardened and sophistocated urban world. And Magnolia's adventures will take her from the savage natural beauty of the mighty Mississippi to the gambling dens and brothels of 'Gilded Age' Chicago to the jumpiness of the 1920's 'Great White Way' of New York.

Ferber was more of a popular than a literary writer, and her style here is very much of the 1910s and 1920s--but her prose is strong and clean, her imagery is magnificent, and as she tells her episodic story of a life and a nation in transition she weaves a number of interesting threads into the tapestry: the poverty of the beaten South, racial oppression, social caste, hypocrisy, and changing tastes in fashion and art. And always, always there is the great river: indifferent to the humanity that clings to its banks and travels its back, by turns placid and savage, graceful and dangerous. Ultimately the river becomes a metaphor for both the rapid changes in America and for the often dangerous power of love, and unlike the stage and film versions there will be few happy endings for the characters as they are swept through life's torrent very much as the Cotton Blossom is swept along the currents. It is a memorable package, and while Ferber would go on to write a great many other novels (including the famous GIANT), SHOW BOAT is perhaps her single best work. Recommended.

The popularity of the Kern-Hammerstein musical, academia's refusal to include the work in the "canon" of regularly-taught American novels, the popular assumptions about the novel's datedness, sentimentality and racial stereotypes--these are some of the factors that have contributed to the comparative neglect of one of the most original, engaging narratives by an American novelist.

Read the narrative "with" or "against" the grain. Ferber's voice is so vital and strong, so multilayered in its social-psychological-historical-cultural-archetypal meanings that an alert reader can not fail to become an active participant in several of the narrative's levels at once.

The river and the theater are not only Ferber's favorite settings but her metaphors for exploring the life of consciousness and explaining the forces that shape personality. Even when Gaylord and Magnolia abandon the Cotton Blossom and take up residence in Chicago, the river lives in them, exposing by its constantly-felt presence what is alive and dead, what is enduring and transitory. Magnolia's daughter and her husband, the "new" American theater of New York, the "reformed" Chicago--all these are condemned less in the surface narrative than in the energy Ferber brings to the subjects that are closer to her heart, characters and places whose life traces its wellsprings to the river.

This is "melodrama" in the best sense of the word--Ferber's music carrying much of the drama normally assigned to prose. The African-American spirituals and folk songs that provide Magnolia's education in turn inform the reader of her values and understandings through the course of her life's journey. Moreover, the narrative's movement matches the river's: it creates unexpected channels, moving forward in time, then backward, a device that enables the narrative to provide a perspective on the past as something familiar, as a place we have already know and treasure, a "spot of time" we've been missing and to which we wish to return.

But the melodrama also works here because Ferber constantly blurs the line between theater and life, letting us in on the "backstage" action that goes into playing a role and preparing a face. Magnolia blossoms only when she is on the stage, and Gaylord is never closer to authenticity than when he becomes an actor long enough to woo and marry Magnolia. Because Ferber presents her characters as deliberately assuming melodramatic parts, we don't see them as stereotypes as much as fellow beings taking on the roles required of us all to deal with life--and the river.

The musical version has a happy ending, with no deaths, no permanent damage. The sentiments in Ferber's original, on the other hand, are at once higher and deeper--equal parts elegy, stoicism, endurance, resolve. Ferber's last sentence describing Magnolia is a replication of an earlier sentence describing her mother: "The river, the show boat, the straight silent figure were lost to view." By this time Ferber's words have become such an integral part of the reader's consciousness that there's little chance of any of these images ever being lost to view.