All the King's Men in Classics Without All the Class

Jun 22, 2019 Seth rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

I could not extract Warren's prodigious talents from his extreme verbosity. Like this:

"If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side with rank l I could not extract Warren's prodigious talents from his extreme verbosity. Like this:

"If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side with rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to congregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an anarchronistic path of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by laying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling them with wood earth. There are a few zinnias in each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house, flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, unpainted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middleaged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease, now the day's work is done and the menfolks are in the field and it's not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening milk." pg 333

Well-written? Sure. Poetic? Yeah, I guess. Functions as a lyric sleep aid, and I don't find this sort of thing nearly as compelling as when Melville does it.

Sometimes he's more than a bit on-the-nose too, like on page 376:

"Good," the Boss said "good," and clenched his hands as though he had tried to grasp some substance which had faded at his touch and dissolved into air.

Morally-complex, middle-aged male character all right. Tony Soprano/Walter White/Don Draper etc. But not really, the Boss was in a movie not a TV show.

Some of the plot and character elements in AtKM also feel sort of... predictable? I'm not sure that's quite right, maybe more like "generic" since a few developments genuinely surprised me. This isn't a universal issue: the main characters are quite well-developed. But a lot of the prose seems to hold to some weird sprinkling of folk wisdom or novel convention more often than not.

Overall, Warren definitely impressed me frequently, but I wouldn't say I particularly enjoyed more than a third or so of AtKM or that I could really identify with the characters outside of one particularly excellent section. But we all have to eat our vegetables and give them four-star ratings.

EDIT: I wrote this review when I was drunk. Three stars. ...more

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