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Title: The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty ISBN: 0-679-72883-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 11 August, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.46 (28 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A haunting novella that lingers in the reader's mind
Comment: This book is the conclusion of Welty's thematic trilogy of Southern family life: while "Delta Wedding" concerns a family gathering for a marriage ceremony and "Losing Battles" relates the events surrounding a family reunion celebrating a matriarch's 90th birthday, "The Optimist's Daughter" is about a funeral. Like her previous works, this last of Welty's novels deals primarily with emotions rather than actions, with character rather than plot. Unlike any of her previous novels, however, this short work has both feet planted firmly in the last half of the twentieth century.
Laurel, a widow not entirely recovered from the loss of her husband many years earlier, returns home and finds herself completely without family. Her father dies, leaving in his wake the appropriately named Fay, a vulgar second wife who represents everything Laurel isn't and her mother wasn't. The rest of the novel describes the various attempts by Fay and by the friends of her father to reshape their recollections of his life to their own needs; a particular humorous scene describes four elderly neighborhood women criticizing both Fay and the deceased--more to affirm their own sense of superiority than to comfort Laurel, who endures every word of their conversation. After Fay leaves town for a few days with her trailer-trash relatives (who cause quite a stir when they show up for the funeral), Laurel is left alone to wander through her childhood home and wonder about her family's past. By the end of the novel, Laurel realizes that neither Fay nor her father's neighbors can take away the only things left in her life: her memories of her parents and her future.
Because of its leisurely pacing, this book isn't for everyone. To say that nothing happens is not entirely accurate: although it's a short book, it's difficult to summarize in even a few paragraphs. It is beautifully written, it's easy to read, and the novel has richly drawn characters--but some readers may feel the novel itself lacks character. Once I finished the book, I was not sure whether or not I liked it, and I don't feel it's her best. At times the book almost collapses under the weight of its own heavy-handed symbols: the birds, the mountains, the thunderstorm, the breadboard. The novel repays a few hours of reflection and rereading, however: passages that are seemingly unrelated to the main narrative eventually make sense. What saves "The Optimist's Daughter," in the end, is both its ability to haunt the reader and Welty's sure-handed understanding of humanity.
Rating: 4
Summary: Quietly Epiphanic
Comment: If you have long wondered what the fuss about Eudora Welty is all about, read THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, the 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winner for fiction. This is no peripheral achievement but the heart of the Welty experience. As you begin reading it, you would describe it as a spare, quiet character study. By the time you finish it--the prose is sleek and straightforward, you glide through it--you are flipping back, realizing the profundities it has kicked up all the way through, hoping you did not miss anything. It is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, fortysomething widow, who has flown back to the south from her career life in Chicago to be at her father's side as he copes with a medical emergency. It is obvious that she has come because the trophy wife/stepmother, Fay, is not considered up to the task by anyone else's standards. The first part of the novel ends with the judge's death; the second part moves back into the Mississippi house where Laurel grew up for her father's funeral. Here Welty introduces the town folk who hold her father and late mother in high esteem, who regard Fay as a white trash outsider nuisance. Fay reminds everyone that she gets all the property, everything they all view as belonging to the deceased parents and the grown daughter. The first two parts could easily translate to the screen or stage; the last two would be more difficult because Welty turns inward, helping Laurel sort out memory, loss, and what it spells for her future. The power of the book lies in how it twists and turns through the four characters--Laurel, her parents, and Fay--moving around the tensions between them until a full sense of the truth is located. What you first know about Laurel and Fay will be challenged. Neither is simple, nor is the story.
Rating: 3
Summary: Stacks its deck too unfairly
Comment: Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is largely told in the third person through the observations of its heroine, Laurel McKelva Hand, the daughter of a prominent and wealthy smalltown Mississippi judge who comes to New Orleans to help her father who must see a doctor for an eye affliction. On hand is the judge's second wife, the silly and vulgar Fay, whom Laurel and the doctor basically ignore. When the father unexpectedly dies, Laurel (who is older than Fay) must return to the smalltown with her stepmother for his funeral.
The reasons for Welty's popularity with THE NEW YORKER editorial board are much in evidence: the story is told subtly and in small pieces, and accrues a remarkable level of hospital and genteel smalltown detail as it proceeds. Its measured rhythms are the best thing this novel has going for it. Unfortunately, it seems to proceed too much along the lines of a contest between discreet Southern gentility and refinement (embodied in the quiet and grieiving Laurel) and no-'count Southern lower-class vulgarity (championed by Fay and her obnoxious Texas relatives). Although Laurel comes to realize why her father's late-life optimism explains why he married Fay, Welty doesn't really allow Fay any sort of appeal to the reader at all, and so you finish the novel thinking how much *nicer* everything would have been had the judge never married her. (At least Tennessee Williams allowed Stanley Kowalski animal magnetism.) The novel seems too much on the side of delicacy , especially given that Welty's own fine feelings are so manifest in her method of telling of the story--though paradoxically some overobvious symbols (a carved boat, a breadboard, the judge's degenerating eye) weigh things down a bit much. The work is most interesting at the end, when Laurel must confront some truths about her real mother's final illness which complicate the overly schematic family alignments in some welcome ways.
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Title: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty ISBN: 0156189216 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: February, 1982 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty ISBN: 0674639278 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Delta Wedding: A Novel (A Harvest/Hbj Book) by Eudora Welty ISBN: 0156252805 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: March, 1979 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty ISBN: 0156729156 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: October, 1967 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title:Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter": A Study Guide from Gale's "Novels for Students" ASIN: B00006G3MP Publisher: The Gale Group Pub. Date: 23 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $3.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $3.95 |
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