I lugged “The Making of Americans” halfway around the world, on flights to and from here in Louisiana to The Netherlands, where I attended Roadburn (a metal fest). A lot of people commented on its sheer bulk. At 1022 pages (plus a couple of introductions), its a chunky book. People who watched me bring it onto the plane half joked that it should count as a carry-on item, and to be honest, I was a little nervous about some overzealous flight attendant asking me to stick it under a seat to see if it would fit. I read about 400 pages of it while in the air, and the rest while sitting in the front room and reading room of the little cottage I now inhabit.
Stein thought that this work would be her legacy, and appeared to have been a little upset that it was not. She thought she had written something to rival Ulysses; critics at the time were less kind, and the book has not occupied a place in the canon. Someone pointed out that it gets “rediscovered” every few decades, and that seems to be borne out, but it never sticks the way say, the “rediscovery “of Moby Dick did. But, I finished it (this was either my second or third attempt to do so, I am not sure), so here I am writing about it a little on the same couch I finished reading it on.
“What’s it about?” people who saw it would ask. That’s one of those questions that doesn’t have easy answers. There’s a very thin plot– two families, The Herslands and the Dehnings grow and prosper (or don’t) in early 1900s America. Two of them, Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning, get married, and the marriage doesn’t work out. Some of the Herslands and Dehnings die. All of them are going to die. Some of them are religious. Some are not. Some of their beliefs vary. And so on.
Mostly, what it’s “about” is Stein’s use of language. The entire book is written in a very intensely repetitive style. You can open it more or less at random and be confronted with something like this:
“Repeating then is always coming out of every one, almost always in the repeating in every one and coming out of them there is a little changing. All the repeating in each one makes a history of each one always coming out of them. There is always repeating in every one but such repeating has almost always in it a little changing, the whole repeating then that is always coming the whole repeating that comes out of them every one who has living in them and coming out from each one is a whole history of each one.”
This makes it an oddly slow book to read– I’m a fairly fast reader, but I had to put on the brakes to understand the sentences. “Chunking”— a trick common among fast (and speed) readers, where you group words into meaningful phrases and read those, rather than individual words, fails because the chunks are made up of repetitions with slight variations. It’s impossible to know what part of the sentence is the part doing the work, and your eyes will just begin to move down the page without comprehending a fucking thing, so I had to unlearn a habit I have had basically my entire reading life. Stein is working with rhythm and repetition as much as she is with language.
These rhythms and repetitions vary depending on who (or what) she’s talking about. It’s a neat trick, and Stein pulls it off without ever skidding off the rails. There’s a lot of discipline involved, to be certain, but it’s not always what it could be— a bit more on that later.
The bulk of the book isn’t dedicated to plot at all– it’s lengthy talmudic categorizations of personality types, observations about human nature, observations about “progress”, and so on. There’s also a fair number of digressions about the writing of “The Making of Americans”, writing in general, and whether or not she can accomplish what she’s set out to do. The last twenty-odd pages could, in my opinion, be read as a thesis statement, but she sticks it at the end of the book for reasons that are, er, Steinian.
It is, as the one of the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition I read states : “deeply flawed”. With each one of these rhythmic shifts described above, Stein is like a musician learning a new scale, playing every possible variation on it until it’s exhausted. She is a great writer in the way that a jazz musician is a great player, she knows all the scales and chords and can play them at blistering speeds until you’ve heard all of them, but unlike a (good) jazz musician, she doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up and let someone else take a solo.
But here’s where I will contradict myself. Some of what makes the book work in the way it does is the relentlessness of its experimentation, and with that, its repetition. There were chunks of the book (especially the section named “David Hersland”) where the repetition and phrasing add up to some genuine emotion; a sadness as Stein writes about the inevitability of our deaths, and the way that others will be left to deal with them. It’s implied, not expressed, and damn it it works. I was genuinely developing some serious melancholy. And, it’s probably safe to say that there are other sections like that which will work that way for other readers, and I have zero way of predicting which one it will be. But I can’t help but feel that the work needed another pass, that it could have been that emotional throughout. However, if there were no contrasts, would those parts have worked? Do the valleys make the peaks more glorious? Or did she just get lucky and her throwing so much at the wall made certain that something would stick?
It’s maddening to think about. That tension— between technique and emotion is at the heart of experimental art, or at least the experimental art I like the best. It’s one of the things that make it glorious. I think Stein was too great a craftsperson to have simply been attempting everything and hoping parts of it would work. There’s no indication I can find that you’re reading anything other than the book she intended to write. And yet, I still found myself bewildered at some of her choices.
In addition to comments about the sheer damn size of the paperback and questions about the plot was the most obvious one— “is it good?” I’m not certain you can evaluate something like this with terms like good and bad. Successful? Not entirely. Fascinating? Absolutely. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve read thousands of books. Since I’ve been tracking my reading, around 42 a year. I’ve never read one quite like “The Making of Americans”. That, in of itself makes it special. I’m glad to have scaled the mountain; but I doubt I’ll ever make the climb again. But there are plenty of places we will only see once in our life, and that doesn’t make them any less significant; an observation I think Stein herself would have agreed with.
The Lithole 
Leave a comment