Reading Raintree County I 1-10-21

 I have been reading Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County for the first time in about 45 years. I remain impressed by the novel. Actually, I am bewildered (how did this intellectual and erotic examination of what is meant by America get to be a Book Club selection?) and shocked (I find myself tripping over more of Lockridge's interests in history ad shifting time than I thought possible - and by how well it was written). I can think of only one other novel where the writer wrote only one novel, and The Confederacy of Dunces is a cupcake in comparison [While typing this, it crossed my mind that the biographies of Lockridge and John Kennedy Toole share a similar ending.] next to Raintree County's multi-layered cake. I knew it was special when I was a teenager as I had already read James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a swath of Dickens and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea before I got to Lockridge. Afterwards, I remember looked for subsequent works, wondering what he could have done as an encore. The search went without success. I did not learn of his suicide until decades later. I still wonder what he might have gone onto. The novel's ambition is breathtaking - there is something of Joyce in its eroticism and interest in history as well as a bit of William Faulkner's gothic humor and preoccupation with the Civil War-  and Sinclair Lewis's and Sherwood Anderson's satire of the small town mentality - and Theodore Dreiser's tendency to thick books packed with research and the ambition to capture the world - and some of John Dos Passos' technique - and for some ineffable reason, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain - and a style that is not beholden to anyone. 

I know the Great American Novel is out of style. I also know teaching an 836-page novel is unlikely - especially when Faulkner and Joyce are on hand for teaching. But there ought to be some recognition for this beautiful monster that came from Indiana, of all places.

[Part II tomorrow, with quotes.]

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