Review: So Big by Edna Ferber

 

This month's Classic Book selection is So Big by Edna Ferber. It's the story of vibrant, adventure seeking, play going, avid reader Selina Peake.  

Raised by her gambler father after her mother's death, she's perfectly happy with her life.  When her father's luck is high, they stay in nice hotels and eat at wonderful restaurants.  When his luck is low, they stay at boarding houses and eat simply.   Through the ups and downs Selina reads and goes to plays with her father. She's always able to entertain herself .  As a student at Miss Fister's Finishing School, she has everything to look forward to.

One day, everything ends when her father is accidentally shot in a gambling spot he favored.

Selina decides to try her hand at teaching in a rural area where her lack of teaching credentials won't matter so much.  Her friend's father is able to get her a position just ten miles out of Chicago. She'll be paid thirty dollars a month and will live with the family of truck farmer Klaus Pool.

As the farmer drives her in his wagon through the community, she's overcome with the beauty of the crops in the fields.

"...the last rays of the late autumn sunlight over which the lake mist was beginning to creep like chiffon covering gold.  Mile after mile of cabbage fields, jade-green against the earth. Mile after mile of red cabbage, a rich plummy Burgundy veined with black."

The farmer's wife at first appears ancient to Selina, but then she realizes the woman must not be thirty yet.  Two girls of the family are "the pigtails" to Selina.  They'll be her students.  The boy Roelf who is twelve "works by the farm" and does not go to school.  Selina can't understand this, particularly when she finds he is a reader, and has a desire to create beautiful things from wood, whenever he can steal the time.

In her largely unheated room at the top of the house, Selina does what she can to make it a home. She observes the hard life of constant work of the farm family.  

Teaching is not what she imagined, with much of her time being spent getting the stove going in the morning for the schoolhouse, and teaching a class where the youngest is four and a half and the oldest 13.  There is the concern that some of the children closest to the heater are sweltering, and some farther away are freezing.  Everyone seems to fidget constantly.  Even so, she presses on teachings sums and sentence structure.

When she falls in love with a handsome young farmer, she imagines a new life in which she can bring beauty to his old, worn farmhouse and his ever failing field crops.  It seems Pervus DeJong has the only infertile land for miles around.  It's plagued by bad drainage and poor soil.

Selina purchases books on farming to try to help her husband overcome the deficiencies of the land.  She suggests new ways to do things.  Her husband is a good man but he's determined to tend the farm as his family has always farmed. 

The life of a farm wife, up at four, working till nine at night and falling exhausted into bed forces Selina to put some of her dreams aside for now.  When she has a little boy, Dirk "Sobig" Dejong, she's determined that he will not live this life she's taken on.  She works harder than ever to make a go of things. 

His life is somewhat charmed, as he pleases people, and he's given opportunities others may not have.  He's haunted somewhat by the hard life of his mother and the lack of money in his family.  He also falls in love with someone who has all the money she wishes for, and he becomes driven to make money.  It isn't what Selina wanted for him, it isn't what she worked for.  Selina's life is always rich, even at the direst times. Dirk somehow has an empty existence, to his sorrow.

So Big has warm, vivid character portraits, a gritty sense of place, all told in extravagant prose.   Rich lives are well lived lives.