Books: Plain People

THE FOLKS—Ruth Suckow—Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Last week irrepressible Publisher “Johnny” Farrar announced Ruth Suckow’s The Folks as ”a great American novel.” His pride was pardonable, if a little exaggerated. A better book than Main Street, The Folks comes as near the indefinable quality of greatness as an honest story about plain people ever can. Most of its readers will feel that “great” should be applied only to a deeper or a higher theme than Author Suckow’s, but few will deny the real worth of this solid masterpiece. Coming too late to start a school, The Folks has certainly finished one, and magna cum laude. The Midwest Novel has been written.

Big (727 pp.) but simple in plan, The Folks is the story of an Iowa family, from the early years of the century to the present. As the story opens, Fred Ferguson, officer in a small-town bank, and his wife Annie are approaching middle age. They have three children and one to come. The old folks still live on the farm outside the town.

Carl, the elder son, finishes high school, graduates from a small Presbyterian college, marries Lillian, the home-town girl who has always adored him, and takes her off on his career of school superintendent. “The good son,” he makes a success of his job, but away from the folks he falls under insidious influences. When he gets the chance to go East and work for a rich foundation he cannot understand why Lillian holds back; it takes her attempt at suicide to show him. Then Carl takes his defeat off to another small town, another small-town job.

Dorothy, the second daughter, always more popular than her elder sister Margaret, marries young, goes off to California to live. In the worrying years that follow, the folks like to think of how prosperously perfect her path has been. It is not until they visit her, years later, that this comforting vision fails them.

Margaret, the family misfit, never gets along with the folks, hates the life to which she is condemned. When she is suspended from Normal School she makes her family miserable until they let her go to Manhattan. There she plunges into Greenwich Village, loses her irksome virginity, and has a desperate affair with a solid married man, who takes her to the Southwest and parts with her there. When they are both back in Manhattan again they drift inevitably together. But they can never marry, prefer not to think of the future.

Bun, the youngest and always the most grown-up of the lot, is his parents’ standby. When he brings a queer, sullen Russian girl home, announces that she is his wife, the folks never get over it. But Bun knows what he is doing, even though his marriage may lead him into strange and dangerous ways. With his defection the folks realize they are now the old folks. Fred retires from the bank, and he and Annie drive out to California for a long visit. What they see there confuses and repels them; they are glad to get home again, even to a life that is now sad and complicated. Their story ends when, back in their old home, Fred reaches for his wife’s old hand, the one thing he can still cling to, sums up everything in the only words he can find: “Well, mama. . . .”

Whether they like it or not, U. S. readers—and especially Midwesterners—will admit that The Folks rings true, has no perceptible alloy in its honest realism. Its cumulative power lies in the fact that it is written straight, with no scintilla of satire or sentimental sympathy. Foreigners might object to the almost total absence of ideas in the book. To them a U. S. reader could reply that the Midwest is the U. S.’s backbone, not its brain.

The Author. Well qualified to speak for her native State, Ruth Suckow (pronounced Soo-ko) was born in Hawarden, Iowa, the daughter of a Congregational minister who moved from church to church all over the State. Author Suckow wrote from childhood, but had more sense than to try to make a living at it. While teaching at the University of Denver she learned how to keep bees, owned and managed a profitable Iowa apiary for six years. H. L. Mencken bought her early stories for Smart Set, gave her a good sendoff. Grey-haired, robust, 42, she is married to a fellow lowan named Ferner Nuhn, shuttles back & forth between East & West but still writes about home.

The Folks is the October choice of the Literary Guild.