The Able McLaughlins
by Margaret Wilson
Summary
The McLaughlins are Scottish Covenanters farming the Iowa prairie in the 1860s, a psalm singing clan of brothers and cousins thick enough to fill a township, presided over by a matriarch of granite good sense. Wully, the eldest son, comes home from the Civil War to find that Chirstie, the girl he loves, has been raped by a cousin, Peter Keith, and is pregnant, alone in her father's bleak house with no way to say what happened.
Wully's answer is immediate: he marries her, tells the settlement the child is his own and lets the elders count the months and think what they like, taking the shame onto himself as a kind of shield. The middle of the book is the marriage slowly becoming real underneath the fiction, written with more warmth and franker feeling than the primness of the era's fiction usually allowed.
But Peter is still in the neighbourhood, and the last movement is Wully learning that he lies dying in a livery stable in town, and deciding what to do about it, and the question the book has been quietly building: whether the cycle stops with justice, with revenge, or with the strange, unwanted mercy of finding your enemy already destroyed. The ending chooses, and readers still argue with its choice.
Around two hundred and sixty pages, plain and swift, with the rhythms of Scots speech and psalm singing throughout.
Best for readers who want the pioneer novel with an actual moral engine in it, and a heroine whose silence the book takes seriously.
Historical Context & Significance
The Able McLaughlins won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1924, and had already taken the Harper Prize for a first novel. Margaret Wilson knew the world at first hand a generation on: born on a farm at Traer, Iowa, in 1882 into exactly this transplanted Covenanter stock, educated at the University of Chicago, and then a Presbyterian missionary in the Punjab for six years before illness sent her home.
India gave her the material for later novels, Daughters of India among them, and her opposition to capital punishment shaped others; in 1923 she married an Englishman and spent the rest of her long life in England, dying in 1973. None of the later books held on, and she is now a one book author in the used bookstore sense, though the Library of America brought it back as an ebook classic.
The novel sits in the same furrow as Rölvaag and Cather, the prairie settlement epic, and holds its place there on the strength of its opening premise, which no other book of the school would have touched.