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This is the most powerful novel I've read.
A Personal ConnectionRoss Lockridge spoke with Bessie often to gather historical data for his book as it pertained to the county. So when I finally picked up the book to read it when I was around 20, it was with some trepidation, from the standpoint that I was hoping it would measure up to everything I had heard. It did.
It's been called "the great American novel", "the great flawed American novel", "a masterpiece", "sweeping and epic", and so on. It is all those things.
From a technical standpoint, the book is too long. It could lose 200-300 pages and still be as good as it is. However, does one really want to lose any of Lockridge's language, discriptions, and evocation? Not I.
Much has been written about the book. But I really think you have to go to Raintree County and feel what it's like to be there. Stand up on a ridge looking over the Blue River valley on a summer evening just after the sun's gone down. There is a magical mysticism that radiates out of the land with a positive energy. What Lockridge did was to capture that energy in his book.
This isn't a must read for everyone, although I agree with some of the reviewers that it should be taught in schools, but only for advanced Lit classes. What Lockridge does--while brilliantly describing the historical period of pre- and post-Civil War America--is show us that human nature and behavior are constant throughout time.
The best book I ever read and I've read thousands!
Lockridge tells the story of John Wickliff Shawnessy, a child of his age, growing up in ante-bellum Indiana. Told in a series of flashbacks, the novel opens on the Fourth of July 1892, when Shawnessy is 53. The holiday's focus is Shawnessy's reunion with old pals Cash Carney, U.S. Senator Garwood Jones, and Professor Jerusalem W. Stiles.
As Lockridge takes the reader through the events of this day, Shawnessy's friends arrive and depart, each evoking for him memories of his early years. Through this prism the reader is immersed in images of pre-Civil War rural America, the upheaval of the conflict, America's 1876 Centennial celebration, and the excesses of the Gilded Age. Shawnessy passes through it all, "life's young American", a scholar, a romantic, a poet, and an athlete.
Lockridge's imagery and descriptive power are truly matched to an author seeking to sculpt the Great American Novel. His evocative use of language is almost unsurpassed among modern American writers - only Thomas Wolfe approaches him. His characters are powerful and will stay with you always, lingering almost palpably like the memories of earliest childhood.
Curiously, only Nell Gaither, Shawnessy's lifelong flame, fails to march from the pages along with the other denizens of Raintree County, Indiana. Suzanna Drake, Nell's rival for Shawnessy, is a beautiful, brazen, and tormented child of the South. Garwood B. Jones, future U.S. Senator, is Shawnessy's boyhood foil, a garrulous and wickedly charming rake. And Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles is the rake-thin, brilliant and corrupted itinerant who lit for two years in Raintree County as sole preceptor and administrator of the short-lived Pedee Academy.
Come to this book when you are young and it will never leave you. As Lockridge noted on the flyleaf: "Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County. You will hunt it on the map, and it won't be there."