A Death in the Family

by James Agee

published

January 1st 1983 (first published 1957) by Bantam

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binding

Paperback, 318 pages

literary awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1958)

isbn

0553270117 (isbn13: 9780553270112)

description

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account ...more

[close] Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.

On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay's wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.

"An utterly individual and original book...one of the most deeply worked out expressions of human feeling that I have ever read."--Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review

"It is, in the full sense, poetry....The language of the book, at once luminous and discreet...remains in the mind."--New Republic

"People I know who read A Death in the Family forty years ago still talk about it. So do I. It is a great book, and I'm happy to see it done anew."--Andre Dubus, author of Dancing After Hours and Meditations From A Moveable Chair

From the Trade Paperback edition. Agee was a poet, a penetrating film critic for TIME and other magazines, an intricate public conscience, and a man who carried all his life the burden of his father's death in a car accident when Agee was six. (Forty years later to the day Agee would die of a heart attack.) He brought all of that, both his gifts and his psychic injuries, to this grave and lyrical story of Rufus Follet, a boy whose world is upended by his father's sudden death in an auto accident. What this book lacks in form it more than makes up for in subtly delineated feeling. Agee's forgiving embrace of the deeply imperfect people he describes, a kind of Whitmanesque tenderness, stays with you a long time.—R.L. (Richard Lacayo) [close]

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Monica rated it:

06/15/08

bookshelves: special-books

Read in April, 2008

recommended to Monica by: mom and dad

original note: This book so far is giving me some comfort.
It's on a list of the 101 best novels since 1923 http://www.time.com/time/2005/... that I haven't studied yet, but think it may sit better with me than the 1001 previously discussed.

This Bantam edition I guess I've had since 1983. It says it's the 13th printing and portions were previously published in The Partisan Review, The Cambridge Review, The New Yorker, and Harper'...more original note: This book so far is giving me some comfort.
It's on a list of the 101 best novels since 1923 http://www.time.com/time/2005/... that I haven't studied yet, but think it may sit better with me than the 1001 previously discussed.

This Bantam edition I guess I've had since 1983. It says it's the 13th printing and portions were previously published in The Partisan Review, The Cambridge Review, The New Yorker, and Harper's Bazaar: all publications worthy of such incredible writing. One half to three quarters of the way through, I felt like I was reading an outstanding classic like F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is The Night", or something the caliber of a great Eugene O'Neill play, with brilliant dialogue, insightful , contradictory thoughts which juxtaposed character's spoken words and actions. Agee portrays guilty sibling behavior as only an older brother could with an annoying younger sister. He painfully shows the cruelty inflicted by children on other children; the alienation, insecurity and loneliness even a six year old is able to experience. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" struck me like a bolt of lightning when I was 15 or 16, and this is no less a masterpiece. Agee's understanding of normal human existence is unparalleled. The book takes place over the span of only forty-eight hours, including a few flashback inserts the editors printed in italics, with a clarity and resonance that will be very hard to forget. This book must be an example of a writer"showing" instead of "telling". It felt so real you could have been hearing a brilliantly written screenplay or watching an excellent stage presentation. The different character's religious zeal, cynical doubts, loving compassion and simplicity shown off the page. What a memory Agee had for every detail and nuance of those forty-eight hours which changed his life forever. The family's tragedy was illustrated at a "snails" pace, in the best sense of the word, each perception, thought, action and word carefully considered and honestly portrayed as only Agee could. His experience as a young boy resonated on these pages. The difficulties he had with his sister, loosing his dad, his relationships with his relatives, made him the great writer he became. I could have read sooner but whenever you get to a book is it's proper place in time and I'm grateful finally found my proper time for this masterpiece.

post script 6/15/08 father's day- I don't know if I'm up for 615 pages for the revised edition because I was so impressed with the first -- it was short and "sweet". That much of a commitment to Agee's writing could be worth it but there are so many film reviews and essays to read, too. On this father's day i salute my dad who worked with Agee at Time and tells the story better than I about having to sit on him to calm him down at a very short Christmas party because there was a woman in the research department (not my mom) with whom Agee was extremely upset; whether because she was ignoring him or was involved with someone else - don't know. Agee, thought normally calm became unglued and enraged and was evidently extremely fired up on alcohol....less

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6 comments

William rated it:

(review of isbn 1572335947)

05/13/08

a frequent comment on this novel is that the writing is "poetic". i think this is accurate and is one of the main atractions of this unusual novel. in the prologue, for instance, agee (who was also a poet) wrote a poem that is clearly an imitation of whitman. this is revealing: whitman celebrated the ordinary person and ordinary life. agee, too, chooses as his heroes ordinary, flawed people and their involvement in and reaction to an ordinary human event -- the death of a man who lives...more a frequent comment on this novel is that the writing is "poetic". i think this is accurate and is one of the main atractions of this unusual novel. in the prologue, for instance, agee (who was also a poet) wrote a poem that is clearly an imitation of whitman. this is revealing: whitman celebrated the ordinary person and ordinary life. agee, too, chooses as his heroes ordinary, flawed people and their involvement in and reaction to an ordinary human event -- the death of a man who lives within a web of family relationships. each family member's character is brought out in their reactions to the man's death and their reactions to each other. multiple varied viewpoints are handled quite skillfully throughout. the greatest part of the novel is presented from the viewpoint of the man's son, presumably the young agee, whose father did die in an accident. we are shown in heartbreaking detail how the boy's loss of his father prevented him from ever recovering from the fear that his father disapproved of him for being bookish and smart, rather than brave. yet every other character is given at least one section to show what and how they think, making this a true ensemble story with many fully rounded participants.

the novel is poetic also in its emphasis on the concrete everyday actions of these people -- for instance, in the prologue, the author describes men out watering their lawns in the sumemr evening in memphis. and in a scene late at night, when an aunt stays with the wife of the dead man, the making of tea is given a prominent and effective place to reflect their awkward interactions. in its feeling treatment of ordinary people and their emotions in a situation of loss and regret, "a death in the family" invoked for me faulkner's novel "as i lay dying", delmore schzartz's short story "in dreams begin responsibilities" and thomas wolfe's novel "you can't go home again".

the quiet poetic writing in this work creates what i can only call an elegiac tone -- an elegy for the dead father, for the young boy's lost childhood, for the life we leave behind when we grow up, and for all human beings who are trying to do their best with imperfect selves in an imperfect world.

(note: when writing this review, i could only find this revised version of the novel on amazon.com; i actually read an old copy of the original edition. agee died before he finished the novel; many sections were lying around loose and the novel had to be constructed by the editors from these fragments. the literary scholar michael lofaro has recently undertaken to reorganize the materials into a different version. i found the original version very satisfying; while i can imagine different organizational strategies, i don't think any of them would make a superior novel to the first version.)

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Ginnie marked it as to-read (review of isbn 1572335947)

06/15/08

bookshelves: books-about-books, family, fiction, to-read

Essay in the June 15, 2008 NYT Book Section about this revsion? restoration? of Agee's classic novel - titled Agee Unfettered
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06...

Published in 1957 to wide acclaim, James Agee's A Death in the Family was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. However, the novel had been so heavily edited by publisher and editor David McDow...more

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Rob rated it:

(review of isbn 1572335947)

09/22/08

bookshelves: americanfiction, autobiography, currently-reading

I'm about halfway through reading this restored text. It cost an arm and a leg for no good reason other than it is a university press edition. You should only read this if you were as blown away by the original version as I was when I first read it in college while living on the street on which the book takes place.
I appreciate all the effort that went into resequencing, text correction and the addition of omitted chapters. To give Agee what is more than likely a version of the book that is...more

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Nick rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

09/10/07

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: those who appreciate the hidden mystery of the emotional moment

This isn't a difficult book but it's certainly not traditional. There is practically no profluence beyond the natural causality of a single incident--the death of a good man. In other words, there are no surprises, nothing is coming that you don't already know, no real "narrative" reason to turn the page.

Rather, the book is held together by a string of incredibly detailed descriptions of highly emotional moments in one family's life. The vivid inner lives of the characters that Ag...more

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1 comments

Trev rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

08/20/08

bookshelves: literature

Read in July, 2008

Agee's use of emotion to carry the story is absolutely awesome. He really doesn't need a narrator, as just watching his characters is enough to know what's going on. The events taking place come to the reader obliquely, through the reactions and dialogue of the characters. In this way, I suppose the novel is more closely akin to a play (and, with Agee's lyrical prose, in many places it's poetry). This is a style I've tried hard to emulate in my own writing, with mixed results.

Unless I'm rea...more

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Generic rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

09/13/08

bookshelves: classics, to-be-read-again

Read in September, 2008

recommends it for: All of you!

James Agee died very suddenly in his early forties after he'd been working on this novel for several years. Those who published it posthumously had to piece it together as best they could, so there are some sections that don't quite fit where they were placed. However, this is still a very powerful piece, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

The story itself is very simple. In 1915, a young man with a wife and two children is instantly killed one night in a car accident. The book follows t...more

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2 comments

Khaya rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

02/25/08

bookshelves: bookclub

recommended to Khaya by: Book club

This month's book club selection. I see why this got good reviews, but I just didn't enjoy reading it. The topic was extremely depressing, and the pacing exceedingly slow. The writing and characterization were good, and he really captured every possible nuance of the father's death and the surrounding relatives' reactions. However, he chose to do this by recording every single movement, thought, and bit of dialogue, for example, even when things had to be repeated for the deaf grandmother, h...more

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Ginnie rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

06/14/08

bookshelves: family, fiction, treasure

I have always considered this book one of my "treasures" but now this classic is under fire. The NYT Sunday Book Section (June 15, 2008) prints an essay about the revisionist version Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text edited by Michael A. Lofaro. Has Lofaro rectified a grievous injustice done Agee’s masterpiece by his protege and literary David McDowell? But if it was already an acknowledged masterpiece, then how bad a job could McDowell have done? H...more

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3 comments

Brian rated it:

(review of isbn 0448068613)

10/31/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: anyone

Agee was working with so many different points of view, with being inside the psyche of adults and children, struggling through the depth and complexity of their thoughts and feelings. He must not have been able to keep at the intensity required to pull this book from the innermost recesses of his soul for long periods. And even with its richness and complexity, I feel that he was probably still working on the prose - there is a longing incompleteness to the book. There is a genuineness about...more

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Veronica rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

07/13/08

Read in July, 2008

recommends it for: people who have experienced any kind of loss

Wow, this book sort of blew me away. I think I'm going to have to read it over and over again before it all completely sinks in.
I can't remember ever reading a more honest book which captures the very essence of human tragedy. If you have ever had to endure the death of a loved one, then you can truly appreciate this book and the beautiful and sorrowful details the author fills it with. Like, the awkward and vibrant tension experienced when trying to comfort a friend who has lost someone,...more

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Will rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

01/01/08

Read in January, 2008

This book was at its best when it was describing the environment and when it was in the head of Jay's child, Rufus. The opening section was magnificently beautiful. The main problem, I think, was with the editing. The editor called this novel a "near perfect work of art," implying that even in its relatively unfinished state, it was already as good as it could be. I disagree. There are some major structural issues here, and the editor, through his glowing admiration, seems to igno...more

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Alison rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

08/10/07

bookshelves: alltime100novel, classics, pulitzerprize, southernwriters

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: all good southerners

Another book that I didn't intend to spend so much time on.

This book is by James Agee who won the Pulitzer Prize for this work. I was interested in this when I found out it was the true account of the reaction of his family to his father's death when he was six years old growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee.

This book was beautifully written. It's not largely plot propelled. You have an idea going into it what it's about, and there are no surprises. The time span is over about four da...more

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4 comments

Maggie rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

11/12/07

Read in October, 2007

This book was mostly a character study - not much action. But the problem was that I didn't really like any of them that much. All of the main characters were grappling with personal issues that were heightened by and examined in light of this death in their family. The most likable characters were the children, although it is unbelievable that at age six one could be so perceptive and intuitive. But I was also interested in the issues of the adults which mostly revolved around vastly differ...more

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2 comments

Katie rated it:

(review of isbn 0141187964)

12/03/07

Read in November, 2007

There's a lot I liked about this, not the least being its simplicity: the novel is essentially a portrait of grief, but succeeds in being absorbing and fresh, mostly for its clean, lyrical prose and psychological acuity. I'd also argue that this book is something of a critique of the Church and religion in general, which I'm always up for. But I made the mistake of reading first the editors' note, which insists that though the book was unfinished (put together and published posthumously), it's a...more

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eva rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

04/13/07

recommends it for: book club

I am about 75 pages in. This is beautifully written--it can be slow at times, but my frustration with that is more a product of general impatience and desire to get immediate satisfaction from a read than it is a measure of how good the book is... I hate how easily I get bored sometimes.

I continued to feel this way up until almost the end of the book. It was quite amazing, though, how very much Agee climbed into the heads of the two children, Rufus and Catherine. The book was published post...more

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Rosie rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

09/19/07

recommends it for: everyone, but particularly fans of poetic prose, people interested in Southern lit

This is my favorite book, and it's totally under-read and underrated. It is about, well, a death in the family- a man who dies and leaves behind a young family. It's also about Tennessee and the early twentieth century and the American Southern neighborhood and parenthood and childhood and marriage and love and Catholicism and personal failure.

The prose is nakedly honest, naturally rhapsodic...really, really gorgeous stuff. Once you've read Agee you never go back, you never find better words...more

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Oceana9 rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

01/12/08

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: the emotionally unafraid

I feel a great keening of the spirit. In its quaint (but also ballsy), early twentieth-century way, this is one of the truest, rarest books I have ever read. Even as it is unabashedly poetic, with crystalline, carefully-chosen words, the plot absorbs the reader from word one. And of course in its moment-by-moment account of what it is like, for the first time, to experience the death of a central figure in one's life, we are brought back to our own, most private memories, the ones kept in a dark...more

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Kay rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

02/22/08

bookshelves: american-lit

Read in December, 1972

This is a simply beautiful book. I first read it in high school and it had a profound effect on me. Since then, I think I've read it several more times. Its themes of innocence and loss are relevant at any age, I think, unlike some novels one enjoys when younger that don't bear up as well when read again at a more mature age. (I'm thinking here of Thomas Wolfe in particular.)

An iconic American work, like To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye. I suspect many of the yo...more

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Tanya rated it:

(review of isbn 0375701230)

01/09/08

Read in January, 2006

Lyrical and beautiful, this book haunts you inescapably. I read the opening prose poem years ago in a creative writing workshop; a decade later, I decided to read the entire novel and found myself steamed with the quiet lyricism of Agee's prose. I am still stunned by that passage (which Samuel Barber later set to music for orchestra and soprano), and one line in particular, which resonates even now with a dignity that is lost to so many authors--

"We are talking now of summer ev...more

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