Dollmaker, The
by Harriette Arnow
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harriette ArnowEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-05-01
ISBN: 0060529342
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: HarperCollins
Book Reviews of Dollmaker, The
Book Review: American Tragedy
Summary: 5 Stars
Harriette Arnow, in The Dollmaker, not only chronicles the collapse of the ages-old rural universe of Appalachia and the subsequent historic wave of migration north to the Northern States during WW II, she gives us a giant of a character in Gertie Nevels. Tall as a man, strong as a man, staunchly independent without even knowing it, Gertie nevertheless kowtows to her overbearing mother, then to her husband's wishes to give up her dreams and everything that has ever had meaning in her life. Highly symbolic, each character is nonetheless surging with blood and gristle and clashing with a society that pits human against human, culture against culture, for profit.
Arnow, a brilliant novelist and National Book Award finalist in 1955, has largely been relegated to "regional" literature and somewhat forgot in recent times. Her first novel, Mountain Path, captured a kind of human being we see little of today in America. Both fierce and fearful, generous to a fault but full of grudges and a firm believer of "an eye for an eye", they are of a time and place that is now almost lined-out with Interstates.
In The Dollmaker, Arnow takes what she so masterfully sculpted in her early fiction and brings it into the light of the world. The rough and raw characters of Mountain Path are now thrown into the mix of the new Detroit slums. Bigoted Northerners, foreign-speaking European immigrants, and the reviled hillbillies of Kentucky, Tennessee and beyond come together in an international community amidst the life-and-death early days of unions and union busters.
The Dollmaker is long and by the end I was wrung out. At times I found myself wanting to shake Gertie, at others, to take her in my arms and protect her. In the end she becomes so tragic a being that I was stunned. It is said that Arnow was influenced by Emile Zola's novel Germinal. The similarities are all there, but their messages, and certainly their conclusions, are significantly different.
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