Years of Grace Hardcover – April 1, 2007

A Pullitzer Prize winner in the 1930'sExcellent read and superbly written.

This story is probably one of the greatest novels I ever read. I first discovered it as a child, and read with fascination about Jane, who grew up in a different time, yet had hopes and dreams so similar to my own. How she fell in love and carried the image of her teenage crush Andre through all her life, how she married a good, oridnary man and had the expected children are all told in wonderful detail as we never lose little Jane, the girl in the beginning of the novel. Then as Jane grows older, and her children grow up, and do and do not fulfil her expectations, she and her husband travel to Paris, and she has a chance to see Andre again. I have been able to read and re-read Years of Grace at many different stages of my own life and to identify with Jane at the different stages of her life. This book contains no explicit sex, no violence, no horror, no supernatural elements, no serial killers and no autopsies done in graphic detail! Yet it is like other great novels, a book one can get lost in and believe in and open up at any point to live in the lives of the characters.I would have loved to have seen a movie of this book, but I doubt if it would have been a blockbuster, as the book was not a bestseller. But it sure is good and it's about my speed. Ordinary people, extraordinary only in their loves and lives and humanity.

This novel is filled with minutiae about the boring daily lives of the women in an upper-middle class family in the decades immediately before and after WW1. With few exceptions, the men appear only as bit players.The characters are uninteresting and, to a large extent, are pictured as spoiled children of a privileged class who grew up to be self-centered and self-absorbed adults. Great to read, though, if you can't fall asleep at night. This will definitely do the job better than sleeping pills.

I have been reading books from a list which I compiled from lists of best 20th century literature. In order to be sure I had a book from each year (after 1918), I included Pulitzer Prize winners, a choice I have often questioned, since the Pulitzer prize winners from this period were often mediocre best sellers; the one exception being Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. This book is no exception, though, as the writing was indeed mediocre to me.Years of Grace is clearly trying to be a Chicago-set version of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. In fact, I found out after I read the book that Margaret Barnes wrote a play version of Age of Innocence just prior to publishing this book.It does a good job of describing the change to the city over a 35-year period. The story is fine. I like the author's intention of comparing different life choices across generations, although a little bit of plot contrivance was required in order to the decisions come out more equaI in terms of effect. I found myself reflecting over choices women had in those days, and such things as the role of a college education.I think it is over-long at nearly 600 pages. I remember being impatient over a paragraph describing neatly folded clothes, and I wondered if the paragraphs and many others like it were really necessary. However, I was most impatient with poor character development, and the inarticulate writing style. One character important to the central plot had absolutely no personality other than being characterized repeatedly as a pretty apple-blossom. There are some well developed characters, but most are 1-dimensional. I read a review that mentioned how Barnes uses the word "twinkling" hundreds of times. After reading this, I noticed it too, and become very distracted by it. However, I think some people will not be bothered by the things that bothered me, so it all depends on your expectations. I heartily recommend reading the Age of Innocence (1920), the inspiration for this book, to everyone. It is much better. If anyone is disappointed by this book, I can recommend some very excellent books published at the same time: Hemingway's Farewell to Arms (1929), Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930), Hammett's Maltese Falcon (1930), Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1931) are some of my favorites.

This 1931 winner of the Pulitzer Prize is a reading must for those who wish to get a glimps of life in America at the turn of the 20th century as it is lived by well-to-do segment of society. The story revolves around Jane Ward beginning as a school girl in Chicago and her early encounter with love and the objections of her parents who will not allow it. She never forgets Andre, her first love, as she eventually settles for a tidy but unexciting marriage to Steven. She just excapes what will surely be a disaster when she comes to her senses about Jimmy, the free spirited drifter husband of Agnes, her long-time friend and former roommate at Bryn Mawr. Jane witnesses life going on around her as she matures into a middle-aged lady but she always feels unable to influence events as her own children take on lives of their own. "I don't act at all...I just drift."

The review below is wonderful enough to give you a good idea for the plot of this charming novel. What happens to Jane makes you consider the way you live life - do you just keep things in order and calm, or do you toss in a radical upheaval here and there? Barnes has written with beautiful description and the story flows quickly. Definitely worthy of its Pulitzer...

I have no idea what all the fuss was about. The book is long and not very interesting.