Thanks to its appearance in the Modern Libarary’s list of the top 100 American novels, The Magnificent Ambersons is getting a lot of reads lately, and a lot of mention in blogs. Neon Hustle, for instance, says:

By all rights, I should have hated The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s got everything I find distasteful in a novel: highfalutin dialogue, aristocratic intrigue, long descriptions of cotillions in excrutiating detail.

But I loved it. Tarkington somehow managed to cobble together a great, compelling story about redemption and the acceptance of responsibility while simultaneously weaving in an elegy for the death of small town America by the cold hand of industrialization.

If that sounds like one serious novel, it is, but it’s also quite a fun jaunt over a few hundred pages.

The novel is a good example of Tarkington’s power: a quality of writing, not unlike Dickens or Twain, that sustains its effect long after the style itself has gone out of fashion. It’s more than just the words or characters; it’s the heart behind them.

Just the other day, blogger Hell Noah also observed:

It was really interesting that I just happened to check this book out the same time I checked out Winesberg, Ohio. These two books were written about a year apart and deal with similar topics. This topic being life in the American midwest and the effects of modernization. The major difference between these two books is that Where Winesberg is from the point of view of average middle class people, The Magnificent Ambersons is about the wealthy.

In my comments on Tarkington’s first novel, The Gentleman From Indiana, I comment that Tarkington prefigures both Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner. It’s interesting that Noah picks up on the similarities, too.