The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 April 2020
by Booth Tarkington
All the world is romance when you're 17. It's about the time our hormones really kick in. Romantic yearning takes on a remarkable urgency. It has been the stuff of literature and culture for centuries, from the youthful tragedy of Romeo & Juliet to the movies of John Hughes. We experience it when we're young, and we go back to watch Sixteen Candles again in our nostalgia for that romantic urgent time in our lives (rose colored glasses firmly affixed, of course). The details of romantic youth change with each passing generation, of course, but the emotional intensity does not. That's why we can look at older literature, or Shakespeare, and relate to great young love. And its awkwardness.
That's where this novel comes in. This short book, by Booth Tarkington (who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Ambersons), was first published in 1916, as America was entering World War 1. It tells the story of young William Sylvanus Baxter, in the summer before his senior year in high school. (The story is reflective, and the coming war does not figure in the tale.) Meandering down the small town street where he lives, William passes an unknown beauty with a pocket-book dog in her arms. He is immediately smitten with adoration for this vision in blonde. What follows, is weeks of his struggle to impress the youg maiden, who is staying with friends a short walk from his house. William is awkward, given to distraction and bursts of trivial outrage. Like a lot of seventeen-year-olds. The girl, Lola Pratt, casts a wide swath of adoration from the boys in town, so William has stiff competition. At the same time, William also has Jane, his ten-year-old sister who enjoys the spectacle and the fun of taking Willie down a peg at every opportunity. At every step of the way, the awkwardness of seventeen throws up obstacles in William's path to conquest.
That's the beauty of Tarkington's writing. He is certainly in tune with what it is to be an awkward young man in love, perhaps by his own memory. His writing is entertainingly erudite, as he uses ornate language to describe the silly failures and stumblings of fate's tiny intrusions into the plans of love. The book is a quick light read, funny and pathetic. The reader may find it a nostalgic trip back in time of familiar emotions in a settng more than a century ago. The reader will no doubt relate to much of its romance and awkwardness.