Review by Edward Tanguay November 25, 1997

This book reminded me a lot of Main Street. It seemed stripped of something, as if you are only getting a couple channels of reality coming in. It was not cartoony but one-dimensional, the characters and relationships where not bizarre, yet they were not real either. It was a Lichtenstein painting ("Oh, Jeff, I thought you gone away for always from me. Oh, Jeff, never now go away no more from me. Oh, Jeff, sure, sure, always be just so good to me").

Gertrude wanted to find her own voice and to explore her own state of mind. This books seems like an experiment.  In fact, on the back of my book, it mentioned that she wrote each of these three stories to match the styles of painters that she knew. In fact, her writing overlaps and repeats like the movements of a paintbrush. The stories are much like paintings in that they have more style than content it seems.  She was experimenting with methods of expression.  Sometimes it seemed that she was writing for a child.  With her simple sentences and repetitions of proper nouns, you often feel as if you are at story hour in kindergarten. Yet these are her "strokes", the way she paints the story.

The characters die for lack of love.  When Lena dies for example, she is missed by noone but the cook.  Could this book be largely about Gertrude herself? I have the feeling that you could find many psychological undercurrents if you wanted to fish them out.  (Isn't it interesting that Ms. Stein studied with William James?)  For example, Melanctha's relationship to her father:

Melanctha Herbert almost always hated her lack father, but she loved very well the power in herself that came through him.

Also psychologically interesting is the way Jane and Melanctha balanced each other out. Jane showed Melanctha the dark side of life:

Jane had many ways in which to do this teaching. She told Melanctha many things. She loved Melanctha hard and made Melanctha feel it very deeply. She would be with other people and with men and with Melanctha, and she would make Melanctha understand what everybody wanted, and what one did with power when one had it.

I liked many of her descriptions:

Life went on very smoothly now in these few months before the summer came. Miss Mathilda every summer went away across the ocean to be gone for several months. When she went away this summer old Katy was so sorry, and on the day that Miss Mathilda went, old Katy cried hard for many hours. An earthy, uncouth, servile peasant creature old Katy surely was. Shestood there on the shite stone steps of the little red brick house, with her bony, square dull head with its thin, tanned, toughened skin and its sparse and kinky grizzled hair, and her strong, squat figure a little overmade on the right side, clothed in her blue striped cotton dress, all clean and always washed but rough and harsh to see--and she stayed there on the steps till Anna brought her in, blubbering, her apron to her face, and making queer gutteral broken moans.

Like in all large and helpless women, Miss Mary's heart beat weakly in the soft and helpless mass it had to govern. Little Jane's excitements had already tired her strength. Now she grew pale and fainted quite away.

It was easy to blacken all the Drethens, their poverty, the husband's drinking, the four big sons carrying on and always lazy, the awkward, ugly daughters dressing up with Anna's help and trying to look so fine, and the poor, weak, hard-working sickly mother, so easy to degrade with large dosing of contemptuous pity.

Jeff was a robust, dark, healthy, cheery negro. His hands were firm and kindly and unimpassioned. He touched women always with his big hads, like a brother. He always had a warm broad glow, like southern sunshine. He never had anything mysterious in him. He was open, he was pleasant, he was cheery, and always he wanted, as Melanctha once had wanted, alwsays now he too wanted really to understand.

There is no overall theme, just the facts. Again, it seems to be a book about style.   Stein seemed to be wanting to stamp her own style on literature("Renowned for her self-regard, she advised her readers to 'think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare, and think of me'").

I liked the story of Lena.  Lena was just there, just physically there:

Lena was the second girl in her large family. She was at this time just seventeen years old. Lena was not an important daughter in the family. She was always sort of dreamy and not there. She worked hard and went very regularly at it, but even good work never seemed to bring her near.

Lena always stood there so stupid and did not answer what anybody asked her.

Lena did what she had to do the way she always had been taught it.

By and by Lena had two more little babies. Lena was not so much scared now when she had the babies. She did not seem to notice very much when they hurt her, and she never seemed to feel very much now about anything that happened to her.

And her husband was of course the perfect match: 

Herman was now twenty eight years old, but he had never stopped being scolded and directed by his father and his mother. And now they wanted to see him married.

I liked the realism of this book, and its peculiar style.  It's "got something."

Edward Tanguay

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