A Death in the Family

Many years later I read the book again while living abroad. Since I was not in an English speaking environment the language and mood of the novel were even more evocative.

I was astounded when I reread the essay called "Knoxville Summer of 1915" that precedes the rest of the novel. This is one of the most beautiful and most effective pieces of English I have ever come across. Agee describes a childs observation of his neighbors evening activities in their back yard in a subtle sequence of events. The essay mixes dreamy metaphor with detailed observation in a slow, rhythmic description. The child observes the rolled up shirt sleeves of fathers watering their lawn after dinner and then tells himself that now the night is a "blue dew". The genius behind this is how the child makes the transition for detailed observation to poetic descriptions of the entire experience.

The rest of the novel is wonderful in parts but hardly equals the opening essay. Agee is very talented at conveying character, dialog, and mood. We sense the warmth of family life before the fathers death and the absolute confusion and bewilderment that follow. It is very painful to read about how the narrator, as an awkward child, is momentarily accepted by his classmates because his fathers death is a new and interesting topic for them. It is a terrible thing that in a roundabout way, the callousness of the boys classmates converts his fathers death into a moment of joy. But it is also one of lifes realistic irony.

The subject matter of this book is tragic and even in its most poetic parts its mood is very grim. You may want to keep this in mind before reading it.

The story takes place in 1915 in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Jay Follet, an ordinary man approaching middle age, lives with his wife Mary and their two small children, Rufus, who is about six, and Catherine, who is almost four. One night he gets an anxious telephone call from his brother Ralph beckoning him to the bedside of their ailing father, who appears to be at deaths door. Jay agrees to go, and in an excellent scene in which Mary makes breakfast for him before his departure, the reader gets a clear view of the kind of relationship they have. The alarm turns out to be a false one, but death is still in the cards: Returning home, Jay is killed in a car accident.

The rest of the novel demonstrates the sudden impact on Mary and her well-meaning family. Her aunt Hannah is the most helpful and the most sympathetic to her piety; her father is an agnostic who takes a practical view of things while her partially deaf mother listens through an ear trumpet; her brother Andrew tries to console her by explaining the relatively merciful circumstances of Jays death with an interesting forensic reconstruction of the accident. Andrew is a cynic who seems to derive his personality from his father; he is quick to detect sanctimoniousness and sourly decries the priest who refuses to give the unbaptized Jay full burial rites. And, in regard to a difficult telephone conversation with Jays inarticulate brother, he delivers the novels best line: "Talking to that fool is like trying to put socks on an octopus."

The text of the novel is interspersed with sections relating the young Rufuss memories of growing up and perspective on his fathers death, the seriousness and finality of which he is not quite old enough to understand. There are nostalgic scenes depicting days and nights on the Knoxville streets, his expectations of a "surprise" which turns out to be the birth of his younger sister, an epiphanous lesson on race relations from his black nurse Victoria, the torment and ridicule he suffers from older, bigger boys when he starts school, and, most piquant of all, a Charlie Chaplin film to which his father takes him.

Although religion plays a role, the novel is not filled with uplifting, hyperreligious cliches that try to find some higher purpose in the tragedy. Agee explores trauma and grief with the hard eye of a playwright, rendering his novel warm but not sentimental, melancholy but not depressing or humorless, melodramatic but not hysterical. "A Death in the Family" is as pure an elegy on the American family as any the previous century could conceive.