Alice Adams
by Booth Tarkington
Summary
Alice Adams is twenty two, pretty, quick, and on the wrong side of the invisible line that divides her unnamed midland city. Her father Virgil is a mild invalid clerk; her mother is a genteel fury who holds his failure against him nightly; her brother Walter has debts of a kind the family does not ask about. Alice's whole equipment for the social climb is manner, and Tarkington opens with the most quietly brutal party scene in American fiction: Alice at a dance in a remade dress, carrying homegrown violets, performing vivacity nobody has asked for, visible to every other girl in the room for exactly what she is.
At the party she meets Arthur Russell, rich, kind and new in town, and for a season the performance works. Alice edits her family, invents engagements, keeps Arthur away from the house. Meanwhile her mother bullies Virgil into leaving his employer and staking everything on a glue factory built on a formula that is not morally his, a venture that curdles into small disgrace exactly as Arthur begins hearing the town's version of the Adamses.
The double collapse is managed without a villain anywhere in sight, which is the book's distinction: everyone behaves plausibly and the humiliation arrives anyway. The last chapter, Alice climbing the stairs of Frincke's Business College to learn typing, is famous, and gentler than it sounds.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want social comedy with an unsparing eye and a soft heart, and the strongest single novel of Tarkington's career.
Historical Context & Significance
Alice Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1922, making Booth Tarkington the first writer to win the fiction prize twice, three years after The Magnificent Ambersons. Only three others have done it since: Faulkner, Updike and Colson Whitehead.
The pairing is neat, because the two books are one argument from opposite ends: Ambersons watches old money fail to hold its place, and Alice Adams watches a family with no money fail to fake one. Critics who rate Tarkington at all usually rate this book highest, precisely because its comedy is closest to cruelty and its sympathy hardest earned.
George Stevens filmed it in 1935 with Katharine Hepburn as Alice and Fred MacMurray as Russell, softening the ending, and the picture was nominated for Best Picture and revived Hepburn's early career. The novel itself settled into the odd afterlife of its author: hugely honoured, hugely sold, and then dropped almost entirely from the canon, kept alive by readers who discover the party scene and cannot forget it.