This dollar-store book-review project has really brought home to me the fact that dreams have a shelf life, and sometimes that shelf life is painfully short. Still, writers have to keep on setting down words in a row, hoping that they’ll beat the odds and become a household name, a writer so well known that she needs no introduction. A writer whose career is so storied that no less an authority than the New York Times describes her as “among the best-read novelists in the nation.” A writer whose name echoes down through the generations. A writer like…
…Edna Ferber.
I sense a few readers nodding in recognition, and a whole lot more readers with their heads cocked to one side like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. To that second group: really? You don’t know who Edna Ferber is? The woman won a Pulitzer Prize, for heaven’s sake. She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Still nothing?
Okay, have you heard of the movies Giant and Show Boat? Those movies were both adaptations of Ferber’s work. In fact, she was a best-selling writer whose career spanned more than fifty years. And yet, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that many contemporary readers haven’t ever heard of her. For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work — or those of you who know only her novels — the 1912 short-story collection Buttered Side Down showcases another side of the prolific writer.
“Happily Ever After”? Not These Folks
Ferber got her start in journalism, working for the Milwaukee
“She is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She bulges in all the wrong places, including her chin.”
That kind of arch, we-both-know-you’re-reading-a-story quality is characteristic of Ferber’s short fiction. She breaks the fourth wall with gleeful abandon in a way that will be familiar to fans of Scrubs or Neil Simon plays (not to mention this blog).
Also characteristic of her work is a rejection of the stereotypically happy ending. As the collection’s title suggests, Ferber’s characters don’t live happily ever after — at least not where we can see them do it. On the contrary, many of them turn away from storybook denouements in favor of their ordinary workaday existences. In her foreword to the collection, Ferber says, “[living happily ever after] is a great risk to take with one’s book-children. These stories make no such promises. They stop just short of the phrase of the old story writers, and end truthfully, thus: And so they lived.”
Slices of Life, Sliced with a Razor-Sharp Edge
Indeed, so they lived. Ferber’s characters include retail clerks, traveling salesmen, stenographers, ex-cons, and the like — not a single charming prince or fairy godmother among them. Moreover, the way they talk and look rings absolutely true (admittedly, these stories were written a hundred years ago, so the reader of today perforce must look at them through a haze of years; the time period is long enough to make them seem at once familiar and exotic). Sure, the dialog crackles with the rat-a-tat-tat energy often on display in old movies — I kept hearing Ferber’s heroines speaking with Katherine Hepburn’s voice — but it never sounds fake. The stories in this collection will leave you savoring the tart taste of vignette vinaigrette.Buttered Side Down
By Edna Ferber
© 1912
Worth a buck?
Absolutely. It’s like a time capsule of witty repartee.
Worth full price?
It’s hard to say. My hardback Signature Press edition from the dollar store doesn’t have a price on it, and other hardback editions I’ve priced seem excessive for such a slender volume. However, the paperback price is quite reasonable, and the e-book price even more so.
Who would like this book:
Fans of slice-of-life fiction, fans of metafictional flourishes, fans of snappy banter
How to get it:
Widely available online.
No comments:
Post a Comment