Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All - Allan Gurganus

[fallenleaf]

This is a sprawling book. Cast of thousands. A million stories. It reminds me of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, second side (speaking vinyl-ly). I always thought that the “songs” on that side weren’t finished. They were snippets that they probably had lying around; they dusted them off and cobbled them together and called it an album side. It seems like a lost opportunity to me that they didn’t take the time to flesh out each one and make it a song in its own right.

This book has a million stories. Too much for one life. Would have been better to split them up. This book was published in 1984 and I don’t know the market forces that drove the industry in the 80’s. Maybe in today’s publishing world his editors would have encouraged him to do that. It might have made better sense, marketing-wise. Why put all your eggs in one basket when you can sell one egg at a time, and do a book tour to support each one? In my opinion, it would have made better sense literature-wise, as well.

The stories are stand-alone good. A young girl from a humble hard-working family grows to be a beauty and is plucked by the son of a wealthy family, who utterly absorbs her. A civil war veteran with a roaring case of PTSD insists on dragging his family back to the scene of his most vivid wartime memory – twice. A little girl, a princess in her village, is kidnapped and sold into slavery. A pampered matron lives blissfully unaware of the undercurrents of revolt in the house below her and pays a horrible, painful price. Young Rebel soldiers see their Robert E. Lee surrender at Appomattox and find themselves suddenly adrift when the war is over. Some of these stories will stay with me for a long time.

But all of them in 875 pages made for a mishmash that I found hard to keep track of. It’s all told in flashbacks from the memory of an old woman. She doesn’t speak in dialect, exactly, but she definitely has figures of speech that were distracting. I couldn’t “get” her voice. Sadder to say, I couldn’t “get” her, either. I couldn’t believe in her as a real person. I used to have an old prejudice that men can’t write women. That’s not true, of course and I’ve since read books that got women just exactly right. I tried to give this author a chance. But at the end, I just couldn’t “buy” his old woman tale-teller, in a book that was just too much.