Joseph Stanley Pennell (1903–1963)

4638. The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters, by Joseph Stanley Pennell (read 6 Nov 2009) Max Perkins was the editor for this book, and it was much hyped, I understand, when it came out in 1944. It jumps around chronologically a lot, and the author in a note at the front of the book says he sought to avoid "too much clarity"--and he succeeded. The Civil War scenes are gruesome but of course that is surely realistic. There is a lot of dialect-like prose, which is able to be comprehended but very annoying. Two words are often written as a single word, which is a device which I thought added nothing to the prose. The scene shifts from Iowa to the South to Kansas, and the characters are easily mixed up and a cast of characters would have been helpful. Towards the end the story line seems banal and I found little to excite me about this book--It is one of Karl Bridges' "100 great American Novels you've probably never read", and my reaction is that it is easy to understand why people don't read the jumbled-up mess.… (més)