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F E B R U A R Y 1 9 4 8
Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge
A review by Charles Rolo
Raintree County, a first novel by Ross
Lockridge, Jr., is a whale of a book in every sense. It took six years to write (after several years of
research), runs to 1060 pages, has won the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $150,000 award,
is the January Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a sure best-seller. Its
merits as literature are a different matter.
The author's aim, he says, was (in the words of James Joyce) to forge the
uncreated conscience of his race. Raintree County is the middle-brow
Ulysses, the Hoosier War and Peace, the Middle Western
Remembrance of Things Past, the freshman's Faust. It's the Great
American Novel every newspaperman dreams of writing.
It isn't just the American myth that Mr. Lockridge sets out to re-create; it's
the myth that governs Life itself. Raintree County isn't simply the
secret source of American life; it is also the Garden of Eden, and the raintree
is the Tree of Knowledge whose golden boughs shed fertilizing blossoms on the
land. Raintree County is nothing short of a primer of human Kultur: it
refurbishes the Bible legends and the ancient myths, popularizes Freud's Totem
and Taboo and Frazer's Golden Bough, delves into literature, history, ethics,
psychiatry, religion. Every character, every event, is loaded with a portentous
symbolism.
John Wickliff Shawnessy, the "unsung poet-hero" of Raintree County, is
the legendary American, symbolically a bastard once removed ("the badge
sinister is the bar of vitality"), at once the architect and the conscience of
the nation. He is also Adam in search of "the secret of his origin" and "the
hero who regains Paradise."
Then there's Garwood (later Senator) Jones, the cynical, unscrupulous
materialist, who sells democracy short but has a heart of gold; Cassius Carney,
the "poet of finance," who dies of ulcers and success; and the "Perfesser," the
homespun Voltaire who knows something about everything and respects nothing,
the perenially sardonic spectator. And there are girls, such girls as dreams
are made on, with an engaging weakness for swimming in the nude.
The narrative is told in a series of flashbacks from a pivotal day, an old-time
American Fourth. Its high points are the Great Footrace (which appeared in
Life) and the exciting Civil War sequences. There's no shortage of love, sacred
and profane, plenty of lusty talk, and a solid vein of humor. Raintree
County has just about everything in it, including a vast amount of hokum.
The book is definitely a tour de force.
Copyright © 1948 by Charles Rolo. The Atlantic Monthly, February 1948
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