Book Review #40 - The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons is the 1919 Pulitzer Prizer winner. That sentence reveals two things. It has merit - especially as a cautionary tale of wealth, accountability and pride - but it is also old. The writing style felt really old to me - not quite vaudville-esque but almost.

It's an interesting window of history to look through. Aristocratic wealth and the gentleman's lifestyle makes way for the Industrial Revolution and a new wealth's ideals rooted in work and invention. The two ways of life are not romanticized, though the tone and characterization throughout the entire book is lighthearted to the point of caricature, and both arrogance and waste of the old life ideal along with the pollution and risk of progress are exposed.

The style kept me separated from the story. I felt too modern to be reading it. Like silent films where actors relied on melodrama to compensate for a lack of sound , I felt like the writing here was from a bygone era when authors stuck to polite ways of description, as if certain language couldn't be used yet. Interesting as both a look at history and once-upon-a-time style, and certainly as a classic of American literature, I'm glad I read it but I didn't love it. I need more intimacy between author and reader in a novel.