Rating: 3.75* of fiveThe Publisher Says: A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney’s wedding.My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, the ninth, is to discuss your favorite character in a novel to hate.Dabney. Hands down, Dabney. What a self-centered nightmare of a spoiled brat! She's marryin' 'neath her, that no-count Troy is just scramblin' for a place in the Fairchilds! But Dabney, she knows:"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy - or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring....And still, there's something deeply Southern in Dabney's greed, something that life in the lush heat of the land down by the water just puts in you, makes you part of it:The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough - all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it - oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth....Dabney's complete inability to see the other person as real makes her a monster, that familiar monster, The Southern Belle. She hasn't got room for anyone but herself in the movie of her life:Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now.Things, the stuff that surrounds people like the Fairchilds from cradle to grave (and they'd take it on as grave goods if only people still did that), *those* evoke tears and memories. Not the people, not the little damn-near stranger in the Fairchild midst, little motherless Laura whose presence is unwished for but accepted because she is Family.And in the end, that's where we end up in this novel, in the Family. Like every family, the Fairchilds have codes and shortcuts in their communication that seem designed to exclude others. That includes the reader of the novel, in fact. But it's not that the Fairchilds don't want you to understand them, or that Miss Eudora failed to give you the keys to a roman à clef. It's this very experience that's the point of the novel. Either you like that experience, or you don't, but this is the point:Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got - and nothing, really, nothing really so very much, happened!Now that said, what makes this book fall short of four stars for me, an ardent Eudoraist? Novels aren't like short stories in that the introduction of a character or inclusion of a detail must be part of the essential nature of the book. There are about a squillion voices in this chorus, and that's just way too many. WAY too many. So there isn't a long-term investment in the current carrying us to...to...wherever it is we're going and we don't quite get to. Miss Eudora could've pruned the voices to Dabney, Uncle George, and Laura, and been able to tell the same big, noisy story. But this is a novel, and writing novels was not Miss Eudora's métier. That was the short story, a form of which she was a mistress.In the end, as much as I loved to hate Dabney and her cut-rate Scarlett-ness, I was only slightly less appalled by the sheer feckless ridiculousness of George, Dabney's uncle and the Fairchild Golden Boy, and the cult surrounding him. His morganatic marriage to Robbie is summed up by Aunt Ellen, one of his groupies:t seemed to Ellen at moments that George regarded them, and regarded things - just things, in the outside world - with a passion which held him so still that it resembled indifference. Perhaps it was indifference - as though they, having given him this astonishing feeling, might for a time float away and he not care. It was not love or passion itself that stirred him, necessarily, she felt - for instance, Dabney's marriage seemed not to have affected him greatly, or Robbie's anguish. But little Ranny, a flower, a horse running, a color, a terrible story listened to in the store in Fairchilds, or a common song, and yes, shock, physical danger, as Robbie had discovered, roused something in him that was immense contemplation, motionless pity, indifference...Then, he would come forward all smiles as if in greeting - come out of his intensity and give some child a spank or a present. Ellen had always felt this about George and now there was something of surprising kinship in the feeling.That gets to the heart of my dislike and discomfort with George. He's so spoiled, so cossetted and babied, that only a severe adrenaline jolt (at someone else's expense) will do to fetch him up among the living.It's not hard for me to appreciate this novel for what it is, but it's not at all the beau ideal of a novelist's art. I like it, I understand why others don't, but goodness me give me the lush, rich, deeply felt beauty of Welty's prose any old way it comes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. To be honest, I can't even remember where my copy of the book came from, I just found it on my To Read shelf (despite having purged a lot of books out recently). The basic description - that a really big Southern family has a wedding in the 1920s - would lead you to expect this book to be really light, but that's just not the case. Welty is a master at work here. The many characters are nicely evoked, with the central characters (Laura, Ellen, George, and Dabney the bride) being really detailed and compelling. Despite the claims of many characters that the Fairchild family is run by the women, it's George who's kind of the emotional center, beloved by everyone despite a few odd quirks and actions (what was up with that girl in the woods?!). Welty really outlines all the complex connections of a family's relationships and shows how those connections electrify at certain moments. I don't really like prose descriptions of nature, but Welty brings it home here as well and makes the Fairchilds' home really vivid. Everything from the weather to the trees to the mosquitoes is almost tangible. While I was reading this book, it was keeping company in my bag with Claudia Rankine's Citizen, which I'm also reading. This made for a strange juxtaposition, because the wedding in Delta Wedding takes place in the early 1920s, and this is a big plantation family; the black characters are treated... not poorly, and definitely with affection, but you can tell this family's attitudes haven't evolved too far from the Civil War that's still within recent memory to them. Most of the black characters are servants who aren't much more than scenery that gets told what to do. The ones who come through most strongly on the page are two elderly women, both of whom seem a bit unhinged. I don't genuinely know how much of this is Welty's own attitudes coming through in the work (original copyright date was 1945) or whether she's written it specifically from a specific perspective; I feel like it's intentional (unlike in reading certain works by L.M. Montgomery, for example, where a casual remark will sound very jarring to a modern ear), and it certainly feels accurate to the time period. Reading this concurrently with Citizen felt very strange, like looking at where we've come to and exactly how we got there.Overall, though, I strongly recommend this book. It was a great read, just lush and lovely, and one I know I'll return to in the future.
What do You think about Delta Wedding (1991)?
Didn't want to like these characters - a family of plantation owners in the 1920s? But found myself drawn in to the rich kaleidoscope Welty creates - colorful chaos, shifting perspectives, and against all odds, beauty. As an only child I can relate to Laura, through whom we first meet the Fairchilds - and reading this book felt exactly like being in a house with a large, colorful family - stimulating, exciting, and overwhelming. Amazed at the way Welty depicts plantation life in the 1920s without romanticizing it as either good or evil. It's a little uncomfortable to like these folks, and to have their lives illustrated in ways that make them relatable. As a 21st century citizen it especially bothered me that she didn't explicitly criticize the treatment of black farmworkers that, at least as depicted in this story, resembled a benevolent form of slavery. Or that she didn't put us inside the heads of any of the African-American characters - and therefore they mostly come off as shallow and ridiculous. But so do most of the white characters, when we're not inside their heads - which makes me think that she is gently pointing out that all of us contain both the ridiculous and the noble, and that you never truly know a person from the outside - so best to treat each other with dignity and tolerance - a message I can get behind.
—Kristin
Picked this up because I adored Welty's "the Optimist's Daughter" beyond words. This one definitely doesn't have the same pull, but the tale of a well-off Southern family gathering for a wedding was interesting. Welty has a way with descriptive prose.Added the fourth star because it will stick with me - mostly for the fascinating relationship the family has with "George" which I couldn't quite put my finger on. Be warned that the depictions and treatment of The Help are problematic and cringe-worthy. Was this an intentional social commentary? Some critics have thought so: Liza Kramer said Welty's depiction of Dabney as oblivious to the African American suffering and loss of life in order to produce cotton and perpetuate the plantation system is itself a critique of white supremacy.
—Brianna
can't say that I'm too fond of this book and yet it was the title I chose for discussion for GWBC in September. FLOP!! It's so sad because the summary sounded oh so interesting. It definitely was NOT what I thought I'd be reading. I'm one who needs continuity with characters and I don't necessarily want to know what EACH character is thinking. Choose one or two and go with it; don't hop about to everyone's thoughts. I think the same ideas could have been portrayed if the author restricted herself to an omniscient voice instead of the limited voice of multiple characters. It confused me at times for which character I was listening to and it just made it a jumbled mess, which was kind of part of the book, but more so than needed. A dislike on this title. Sorry, Eudora Welty...and I had such hopes.
—Elizabeth Boyd
