|
James
Fenimore Cooper
HOME AS FOUND (Sequel To HOMEWARD BOUND) Wildside
Press (October 30, 2008)
ISBN-10: 143447402X SBN-13: 978-1434474025 Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. biblio (01/14/2010) title of this review: A SATIRE WITH MANY, MANY CHARACTERS (66 named people by my count). In 1838 James Fenimore Cooper issued two intertwined novels about the wealthy New York Effingham family. The first, HOMEWARD BOUND was a sea-adventure tale with, by my count, 27 named characters, of whom seven are of considerable importance. Novel the second was HOME AS FOUND. Its total of 66 named characters includes the seven "biggies" of HOMEWARD BOUND plus three new ones worth keeping an eye on. The first new face is loud-mouthed, ill-mannered, majority-courting American lawyer Aristabulus Bragg. For the past five years Bragg has been estate manager of the inland New York estate of wealthy Edward Effingham, during part of the latter's dozen years in Europe. HOMEWARD BOUND's launching pad is Manhattan Island, where the surviving passengers of the sailing packet Montauk have just landed after adventuring on the coast of Africa and after a dogged chase across the Atlantic by a British warship. Making her first appearance in bustling New York City in the two-volume saga -- slightly before Aristabulus Bragg -- is the well-formed, glamorous, old-line orphaned 20-year old heiress Miss Grace Van Cortlandt. Grace and Eve Effingham, wealthy heiress and heroine of HOMEWARD BOUND, are sister's daughters, eager to reunite after years of separation while growing up, respectively in the USA and in Europe. A third memorable new character, admittedly minor but an important figure of fun and gentle satire, is Commodore Dickey, who traditionally "commands" the waters of Lake Otsego in central New York, ancestral home of the Effinghams (inherited after marriage with the founding Temples). He becomes a mouthpiece for some of Cooper's views on American religion and religious hypocrisy. HOME AS FOUND has been called America's first satire of American manners in a novel by an American. James Fenimore Cooper heavy handedly, for the most part, struts his player across his pages to make various political or societal points: (1)
America started brilliantly with the generation of Franklin and
Washington and its glorious Constitution.
(2) But the new nation quickly descended into rabid, selfish, tunnel-visioned pursuit of wealth, especially through speculating in western lands. (3) America imitates Britain and France, when it should be creating its own superior standards of behavior, taste and achievement. (4) Examples of gauche American behavior and attitudes are strewn across the novel's pages. There is absolutely no point in reading HOME AS FOUND before you read HOMEWARD BOUND, as the author makes clear in no uncertain terms. He even explicitly assumes that readers remember descriptions of the Effingham ancestral home in fictional Templeton (today's Cooperstown) sketched eleven years earlier in Cooper's early novel, THE PIONEERS. The book can be tedious, especially when describing thinly veiled ill-tempered but real controversy between the author and denizens of Cooperstown over the recreational use of a piece of property on Lake Otsego. But HOME AS FOUND is also a romance involving two aristocratic couples and even the low-life Aristabulus Bragg and the French maid of heroine Eve Effingham. There are four or five pairs of first and second cousins, some in confused identity and one with dubiously legitimate birth. Clearing up the mystery of paternity of one of them gives a last, lingering taste of the mysterious "Gothic" genre so popular when Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper began their writing careers. All in all, HOME AS FOUND is, frankly, a difficult book -- but abounding in nuggets. It takes two readings to do the book justice. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/254936329.html =-=-=-=-=-= II. lunch.com 01/15/2010 writing as QIGONGBEAR TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: First literary mention of baseball? REVIEWER'S RATING: * * * * Qigongbear's rating of HOME AS FOUND: * * * * In 1838 James Fenimore Cooper published two novels. HOME AS FOUND made the sequel to HOMEWARD BOUND. In fact, these two novels complete a family saga begun 15 years earlier in Cooper's early novel THE PIONEERS. What unifies the three books? -- (1) All three novels are about
the fictitious Effingham family. The great great grandfather of the
hero of HOMEWARD BOUND, was Edward Effingham. He fought loyally for
Britain in the American Revolution and lost all his vast properties in
central New York State and elsewhere. He had a pre-war but now rebel
friend and business partner named Temple. Judge Temple quietly bought
up his old partner's confiscated properties at war's end. Around 1790
on the shores of Lake Otsego Judge Temple founded the village of
Templeton. By the end of THE PIONEERS a mysterious male descendant of
Colonel Effingham had married the daughter of Judge Temple and thereby
acquired title to the united properties of Temples and Effinghams.
NOTE: THE PIONEERS is thinly veiled history and biography. For James Fenimore Cooper's father had founded Cooperstown on Lake Otsego -- the fictional Templeton. And James grew up there; and in later years, as a world famous novelist, bought back his old family estate and moved there with his family. -- (2) The 25 year old romantic hero of HOMEWARD BOUND appears around 1835 aboard a passenger ship bound from London to New York in an assumed identity as Mr Blunt. After a dozen years in Europe, three Effinghams are returning home on the same sailing packet: widowed Edward Effingham and 20-year old daughter Eve along with John ("Cousin Jack") Effingham. Both men are brother's sons, born on the same day. Each was 50 years old on the October day their passenger ship left London. They are surprised to find the man they had met years before in Vienna as Paul Powis now calling himself Blunt. Their made-in-New York sailing ship, the Montauk, for mysterious reasons, is pursued all the way to America by a British warship. On route, in their efforts at evasion, their master, Captain Jack Truck is caught by a storm, his ship dismasted and left helpless in shallow but protected waters off the Atlantic coast of north Africa. In battles with the Arabs who have captured the Montauk, young Blunt/Powis proves the Achilles among the male passengers and crew who retake the ship. Eve and Paul fall in love but tell no one, not even each other. -- (3) Back to THE PIONEERS. That novel of 1823 introduced to the world Cooper's most famous single character: Natty Bumppo, hero of THE LAST OF THE MOHCANS and four other Leatherstocking tales. Natty, aka Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, etc. by his Indian friends and enemies, and his Mohican Indian chief friend Chingachgook had been scouts of the British Army during the revolution and apparently served under Colonel Edward Effingham. The quintessential American: Natty Bumppo! The old Colonel had lost his mind and was being discreetly and without publicity cared for in 1790 at Lake Otsego by Natty and Chingachgook (now a converted Christian known as Indian John). They teach woods lore to the young Effingham who marries the young Temple to start the Effingham series of novels. Natty would die in his 80s out on the Nebraska plains around 1820. The Templetons and others pay respect to his memory and spirit in HOME AS FOUND. * * * * *
Do you really need all that background to read with enjoyment the third novel in the trilogy: HOME AS FOUND? I am afraid you do. Cooper himself says that you do and refers you to THE PIONEERS for a detailed description of the interior of the Effingham manor ("The WIgwam") in Templeton. HOME AS FOUND is not an easy read. It was only on a second reading that I truly found pleasure in Cooper's loosely plotted, often static novel. It is full of little vignettes, picnics, fishing excursions and such like, any one of which might have been spun into a short story or even novella or a satire or a political broadside. HOME AS FOUND is thought to be THE most autobiographic of Cooper's novels and shows him immersed in quarrels with the citizens of Templeton about his property rights. Ho hum! The novel's thin romantic plot ends with the marriage of Paul Powis to Eve Effingham. Paul and Cousin Jack learn that they are son and father. So two second cousins marry and strengthen the ancestral Temple-Effingham claim to the Wigwam and its very large associated fortune. By novel's end they have produced a daughter. The Effinghams then disappear from literary history. In large part Cooper intends in this novel to hold up an American mirror to American ways. I835-6 America is shown in HOME AS FOUND as it appears primarily to the wealthy, polyglot, cultivated Effinghams, to their servants and others returning to The Wigwam after a dozen year absence -- or by yet others seeing America from various aspects. By and large, America has fallen off from its almost miraculous revolutionary wars, an era of Washington and Franklin. In 1835 it is busy expelling Indians west of the Mississippi, with South Carolina invoking "nullification" and threatening secession from the Union. Money-grubbing is the national passion. The goal is to get rich quickly by speculating in western lands. Religion is being leveled and desanctified in the name of the common man and majority rule. Let's end with a brief look at a possible first mention in literature of America's national pastime: baseball. Readers probably know that Cooperstown, NY houses the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. And scholars think that baseball was played in Templeton/Cooperstown and described in 1838 in HOME AS FOUND. Certainly a bunch of trespassing boys are accustomed to playing "ball" on the grounds of The Wigwam. And they hit their ball with sticks -- some good long distances. Bases and base-running are not mentioned, however. The newly returned Edward Effingham orders the boys to play somewhere else. You will read about early steamboats plying the Hudson River and also crossing the English Channel, with hints they will soon sail the Atlantic, too, as passenger ships -- replacing luxurious sailing packets like the Montauk. You will also see canal boats and early railroad trains. There is something for nearly everyone in HOME AS FOUND. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/EditReview?id=1434430 =-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-= III. bn.com Title of this review: "God never intended an American to kneel." Reviewer Ausonius's rating of HOME AS FOUND: * * * * Posted 1/15/2010: On a summer day in May 1836 or thereabout look down from a mountain called The Vision into fictional Templeton, on the shores of beautiful (real) Lake Otsego in central New York. You will see the spires of five churches in a village of a thousand or fewer Christian souls. Templeton (in reality today's Cooperstown) is the ancestral seat of the combined families of Temple (through the daughter of the village's founder) and Effingham (through a young man who married that daughter in the 1790s). Two fifty-year old cousins, Edward and John (Jack) Effingham have just returned home after a dozen years in Europe, Jerusalem and elsewhere. With them is Edward's lovely 20-year old daughter, Eve Effingham. The Effingham saga is told in three novels by James Fenimore Cooper. The first, THE PIONEERS, appeared in 1823. The second (HOMEWARD BOUND) and third (HOME AS FOUND) were published in 1838 -- years after Fenimore Cooper himself had returned home following eight productive years in Europe. (In England HOME AS FOUND is titled EVE EFFINGHAM.) And much as Wilfred of Ivanhoe is one of the least colorful characters in Sir Walter Scott's IVANHOE, so is Eve Effingham in HOME AS FOUND. At novel's end she will wed a mysterious man first met years ago in Vienna. Then he called himself Paul Powis. On board the ship they all shared in HOMEWARD bound he was Mr Blunt. In an earlier incarnation in the U.S. Navy he was Assheton, the false name under which his father had married Miss Warrender, Paul's mother. By novel's end he is revealed as Paul Effingham, son of John Effingham. The two second cousins wed and produce a little girl. HOME AS FOUND contains all the riches of Ali Baba's cave: romance, Gothic mysteries, politics, but primarily satire of 1830s American manners as seen by various stripes of English, French and American observers of the passing parade. Cooper's insights into religion is all we have space to touch on in this review. As noted above, the village of Templeton has five churches and even more religious opinions among local Templetonites, most of them recently arrived "birds of passage," who will soon be off to the west. The aristocratic, immensely wealthy Effinghams are Episcopalians and believe religion is supply-side: about the dignified worship of God. Most of their local interlocutors think otherwise. Churches are demand-side: for the people. The oldest local church should be rebuilt to resemble an amphitheater. No more elevated pulpit or enclosed, high-walled pews. No kneeling. "God never intended an American to kneel," argues lawyer and estate manager Aristabulus Bragg. Americans love variety in creeds. FIve churches attract more investment to a town than would only one. Churches should be built or rebuilt to emphasize preaching and de-emphasize praying. Eve Effingham is shocked. Her religious reputation goes down quickly in Templeton. For Eve dances. She reads her prayers from a book. She plays cards. This can only be French, certainly not American. Wander about in this novel's cave of Ali Baba. See early canal cars, steamboats and trains. Wonder at women's fashions and the foreign policy of Andrew Jackson. Watch boys play baseball in what may be its first recorded literary record. See Fenimore Cooper skewer Steadfast Dodge, the kind of newspaper magnate who came to dominate American politics. Do not rush through these treasures. They are many. Some are very funny. -OOO- Also recommended: -- James Fenimore Cooper: THE PIONEERS, HOMEWARD BOUND. -- Sinclair Lewis: MAIN STREET. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Home-as-Found/James -Fenimore-Cooper/e/9781406555813/?itm=6&usri=james+ fenimore+cooper++home+as+found =-=-=-=- IV. amazon.com (01/16/2010) TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: America's first novel of American manners by an American author REVIEWER'S RATING: 3.5 stars, rounding upward to 4.0 How do you review a long, 29-chapter book with nearly 70 named characters, a dozen or more of whom are reasonably central to the tale? And of those dozen "biggies", nine are carryovers from a previous novel. That is the nature of James Fenimore Cooper's 1838 HOME AS FOUND, the continuation and completion of the same year's HOMEWARD BOUND. HOMEWARD BOUND was a sea adventure tale, of the sort pioneered by Cooper in 1823 with THE PILOT, featuring John Paul Jones and the American Revolution in British waters. HOMEWARD BOUND also launched an entirely new genre of novel: the passenger vessel as microcosm of a society or societies. The societies in question were mid-1830s England and the USA, and their 27 named characters represented national strengths and weaknesses. For mysterious causes, the luxurious 700-ton American sailing packet Montauk was chased from London and Portsmouth by a British warship clear across the Atlantic. The Montauk was dismasted in a severe storm. It took refuge in protected coastl waters off North Africa where it was seized by Arabs and then recovered by its own crew and most of the men passengers. It then refitted its rigging from a cannibalized Danish freighter and limped safely into Manhattan harbor, lightened by deaths of several men through combat and after the removal of two passengers by the British corvette. * * * * *
HOME AS FOUND begins in Manhattan the day the Montauk arrives and its passengers disembark. Our focus throughout is on three members of the wealthy, refined Effingham family on their way home to their (fictional) ancestral New York village, Templeton (today's Cooperstown), after a dozen years in Europe and elsewhere. The UK edition of this novel was named EVE EFFINGHAM and that 20-year old heiress is even less central to the story named for her than Sir Walter Scott's Wilfred of Ivanhoe had been in IVANHOE. Eve was only eight when she sailed for Europe with her recently widowed father, Edward, and with her nanny. In France they acquired and still have in New York Mlle Viefville, Eve's governess, and a chambermaid, Annette. From time to time they were joined by Edward's first cousin (brother's sons they were, born on the same day) John ("Cousin Jack") Effingham. Aboard the Montauk Eve had fallen in love with a young man met years earlier in Vienna. He was taken off the Montauk by the British warship's captain. By novel's end, when they and another couple wed in a double ceremony in Templeton, we will have known this young hero under four names, Mr. Blunt, Paul Powis, Paul Assheton and, finally, after identity unraveling, Paul Effington, legitimate son of immensely wealthy Jack Effington. The plot is weak and through its false identities, Gothic. The Effington party spends the winter in Edward's town house in Manhattan. It then moves by steamboat up the Hudson, then by canal and carriages on to the "the Wigwam," the restored family mansion in Templeton on Lake Otsego. Cooper was quite clear that the point of HOME AS FOUND was not adventure but satire: poking fun at American pretensions in the 1830s. Americans are seen as greatly declined after even the mere dozen years the Effinghams had spent learning languages, hobnobbing with a Czar, an Emperor and the great ones of Europe. They had ranged from London to Paris to Rome to Jerusalem and then went back home to New York. And what did the proud Effinghams find at home? Americans are provincial. They do not think for themselves. They take their ideas primarily from England and secondarily from France. In religion they are demand-side levellers. The returned Effinghams meet and resist a strong popular movement to convert the venerable Episcopalian church in Templeton into an amphitheater with no pulpit, opened up pews and with all future emphasis on preaching rather than praying. Templeton has five churches and even more sects and most local Christians disapprove of Eve because she dances, plays cards and reads her prayers from a book. During their winter season in Manhattan, the Effinghams and Mlle Viefville had attended a series of entertainments. Only one evening passed Effingham muster: an hour with an old-line hostess open to quiet, un-pushy, educated, creative old-line friends. Other parties are built either around nouveaux social climbers or pseudo-intellectuals and artists. "Hajjis" are in great demand. By this term is meant returned Americans who have spent at least a week or two "doing" Paris. It is the custom in Manhattan "society" for women to move about a hall on the arm of a man. Eve and Mlle Viefville follow French fashion and move around unescorted. Horrors! Most of these people are scorned by the proud Effinghams and are disliked in turn. Are these Effinghams clones of Jane Austen's haughty Mr. Darcy? In HOME AS FOUND we deepen our acquaintance with off-putting American Steadfast Dodge, introduced to us on the decks of the Montauk in October 1835 (or thereabouts) in Portsmouth. He is a newspaper publisher returning from a couple of months in Europe whence he filed reports on the "true" state of affairs for a coterie of ignorant American readers. in HOMEWARD BOUND he ran from combat with the Arabs, but now unabashedly presents himself to readers as a hero. We also renew acquaintance with grizzled 60-year old Captain John Truck of the Montauk, invited to Templeton after another voyage to and from London. He becomes chums with a local fisherman dubbed "the Commodore." They spend many happy hours together on the lake, philosophize about the merits of salt water sailing v. fresh water sailing, drink together and admire the Effinghams together. Captain Truck had been lionized in Manhattan parties, where he was once mistaken for an Episcopalian clergyman. But the better people of Manhattan society recognize the Captain as a diamond in the rough. He even falls in love with a 70-year old American lady of true high society. And so it goes. America, argues Cooper, began extraordinarily well with Washington, Franklin and the Founders. But just look at it now! Men live to get rich quick, especially through creating speculative bubbles in western lands and the expanding frontier. Americans are provincial, levellers, jealous of their betters (better by virtue of inherited estates, education and demonstrated merit). Templeton is unrecognizable after a twelve year absence abroad. "Birds of passage" make up half New York's population. They come to an older settlement, pause a year or two for a breather before moving on westward, and try to change the good old settled ways of yore. Cynical Cousin Jack Effingham argues that 18 months in America is the equivalent of a generation in Europe. Things change very fast in Templeton, as elsewhere in the USA, and usually for the worse. HOME AS FOUND has been called America's first novel of American manners written by an American. Cooper held up a mirror to show his provincial countrymen how they might look to a family returning after a dozen educational years abroad. It was not a pretty picture. HOME AS FOUND has considerable humor. I found myself chuckling aloud a couple of dozen times. But its humor is sarcastic, obvious humor. James Fenimore Cooper attempted something important. His brain teemed with insights. But he often failed to find the right words or a light touch to make his point. He argued that it was almost impossible to write a novel of manners about America. For America had little history no hereditary social classes. And yet ..... HOME AS FOUND grows on you. I was confused, lost in detail and bored after a first reading. I greatly enjoyed the second. I now rate this book Three and a Half Stars, rounding upward to Four Stars: * * * *. -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Found-Works-James-Fenimore -Cooper/dp/143447402X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books &qid=1263054776&sr=1-1 -=-=-=-=---= V. epinions.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Sir, I am a cat..." by aohcapablanca, Jan 16 '10 Reviewer's rating of HOME AS FOUND: * * * 1/2, rounded upward to * * * * . HOME AS FOUND is the 1838 sequel to HOMEWARD BOUND (elsewhere reviewed) of the same year. After being chased by a British warship clear across the Atlantic, the luxurious 700 ton sailing packet Montauk limped into Manhattan and disembarked its remaining passengers. The latter include 20-year old Eve Effingham (the U.K. edition of HOME AS FOUND bears her name). She had fallen in love on the voyage over with a 25-year old or a bit older Adonis/Achilles already bearing two names: Mr Blunt and Paul Powis. By the second novel's end he will bear two more surnames: Assheton and finally Effingham. But Paul was whisked away to England by the British warship and Eve feared that he would go to prison for some unnamed crime, possibly for desertion from the British navy. So Eve is now in Manhattan. She will spend the winter with her father, Edward, in the family's town house. Accompanying them is her father's first cousin John Effingham. Both had loved the woman who became Eve's mother. The successful suitor had been Edward. Rejected John ("Cousin Jack"), as we learn by fits and starts and finally in a rush toward the end of HOME AS FOUND, had married, under the name John Assheton (his mother's family), a beautiful young woman in Philadelphia. He then told her she had been his second choice. In her pride she kicked John out. He wandered angrily out in the west. After a year he decided to patch things up but learned in St. Louis that his wife had died. No one told him she had borne a son. And the thin, gothic, romantic plot builds toward a double wedding of second cousins Eve Effingham and Mr Blunt/Powis/Assheton/Effingham on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Eve's orphaned best friend and first cousin ("they were sister's daughters"), the rich heiress Grace van Courtland with a wealthy English baronet Sir George Templemore who had traveled aboard the Montauk under an assumed name. True, honest Sir George Templemore had already told Grace before the wedding that he had first loved Eve, who had not, however encouraged his advances. COMMENT: It is to be hoped that Grace will not explode the way Paul's mother had against her husband on the rebound from a first love. That mildly Gothic but relatively serene plot lacks the adventures, chases or efforts at better White Man-Red Man understanding that characterize better known Cooper tales such as THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and THE PILOT. Cooper makes his stretched beyond capacity plot frame and contain dozens of characters, dialogs and little essays explaining 1830s Americans to themselves. Most Americans, are, Cooper unsubtly suggests, correctly and justly judged by the Effinghams on the basis of the latter family's several generations of stability in New York, their wealth, their gentlemanly and ladylike arts, their languages, interactions with crowned heads of Europe, their travels to Paris, London, Rome, Vienna and Jerusalem and by their menfolk's superior grasp of American history, politics and constitution. 50-year old Edward Effingham cannot believe that his beloved America has gone backward morally and intellectually so fast in the mere dozen years he was abroad with Eve. More cynical Cousin Jack assures him that 18 months in America is like a generation in Europe. Arrived in fictional Templeton (real Cooperstown) on Lake Otsego and having resumed residence in their ancestral (1790) mansion now renamed The Wigwam, the Effinghams find few familiar faces. For America is on the march to the west and human "birds of passage" now set the tone in Templeton. They will only stay a year or two, but they insist on remaking the Effinghams' old Eden anew. Those birds of passage have added four churches and even more sects to the old Episcopalian temple patronized by the Effinghams. And even that venerable, sober church they propose to democratize. Down with pulpit! Rebuild the body of the church in the form of an amphitheater! Tear down the old aristocratic, private, high-enclosed family pews! Replace praying with hot gospel preaching! It is all too much for Eve, who thinks it proper to kneel and humbly worship our unspeakably great God. No! say Effingham's lawyer estate manager, Aristabulus Bragg and other locals. "God never intended an American to kneel." And who, after all, is Eve Effingham to judge the birds of passage? She is seen locally as being more snootily French than back-slapping American. Eve reads her prayers from a book. She dances. She plays cards. She strolls around receptions and parties all by herself -- i.e. not arm in arm with a man which is de rigeur in fashionable 1830s American society, such as it is. Let me end this review with just one image that Cooper uses to contrast stable, home-loving English attitudes with rush, rush, money mad, ever changing American values. Aristabulus Bragg, the Effinghams' estate manager lo, these past five years, tells the newly returned owner and his family and guests that the Effinghams would have been more in tune with contemporary America if they had simply torn the old home down rather than allowing Cousin Jack extensively to have remodeled its exterior. By now the family could have rebuilt a more contemporary Greek revival mansion in native pine somewhere else and profitably have run a highway or a railroad through the original home site. The visiting baronet, Sir George Templemore is baffled. Does Mr Bragg feel "no local attachments?" No he does not. "The house I was born in was pulled down shortly after my birth, as indeed has been its successor..." To this Sir George simply states: "Sir, I am a cat and like the places I have long frequented." At scattered but appropriate intervals in the remaining pages of HOME AS FOUND, various Effinghams echo Sir George. They are all "cats" when it comes to loving their family's old home. Templeton and New York are not what they once were, even to orphaned Eve who had left home at age eight with her father and her deceased mother's old nanny for faraway France where she would acquire both a distinguished French governess and a femme de chambre who are still with her back home in the USA. America is unraveling. South Carolina is already threatening secession and the Indians are being force marched across the Mississippi. HOMEWARD BOUND is like Ali Baba's cave, full of many varied riches. I have held my candle up over only a couple of them. Explore for the rest yourself and, by and large, you will not be disappointed in the people, the scenery, the feeling for 1830s America presented by Fenimore Cooper -- all this too often, alas, presented clumsily in words not up to the original thoughts and penetrating slants of his fertile brain. * * * * * One such additional treasure item from HOME AS FOUND I will shortly probe in greater depth on February 4th, 2010 in a 30-minute talk to my Asheville Torch Club. My theme will be why creators of fiction sometimes take pains to root their novels (which are obviously fictions) or poems in allegedly true documents or visions or revelations from God -- truth claims which many sensible readers reject. Sir Walter Scott indulged in this practice. James Fenimore Cooper did it in his two novels of 1838. Why? In a couple of weeks, please read my website http://www.patrickkillough.com and see what I shall have come up with. Thanks for reading my review of a difficult but rewarding book. Thanks also to epinions' panguitch/Andy for adding this venerable golden oldie to the epinions list of reviewable works. I rate HOME AS FOUND * * * 1/2 stars, rounding upward to FOUR. -OOO- Pros: First novel (1838) of American manners written by an American. Biting, funny satire. Memorable characters. Cons: 29 long chapters. 71 named characters. Thin plot frames too much content. Writing sometimes clumsy. The Bottom Line: Indispensable reading for historians of American literature. HOME AS FOUND is the first novel of American mores by an American. Heavy, complicated reading for others. But funny and rewarding, too. -OOO- http://www.epinions.com/reviews/James_Fenimore_Cooper _Home_as_Found_epi -=-=--=-=-=-=-=-= BACKGROUND NOTES
KEY CARRY-OVER CHARACTERS FROM HOMEWARD BOUND -- Paul Blunt [Powis] -- Captain Charles Ducie, -- Edward Effingham, -- Eve Effingham, -- John Effingham -- Sharp [Templemore], -- Ann Sidley, -- John Truck, -- Mlle. Viefville. KEY NEW CHARACTERS APPEARING IN HOME AS FOUND: -- Aristabulus Bragg, -- The Commodore -- Grace Van Cortlandt, =-=-=-=-=-= ALL CHARACTERS: HOMEWARD BOUND: (27) Paul Blunt [Powis], Brooks, Mrs. Davis, Robert Davis, Steadfast Dodge, Captain Charles Ducie, Edward Effingham, Eve Effingham, John Effingham, Grab, Green, Handlead, Leach, Monday, Henry Sandon, Saunders, Seal, Sharp [Templemore], Ann Sidley, Tom Smith, Sir George Templemore [Sandon], Toast, Captain John Truck, Mlle. Viefville. HOME AS FOUND: (71) Bianca-Alzuma-Ann Abbott, Oriando Furioso Abbott, Rinaldo-Rinaldini-Timothy Abbott, Roger-Demetrius-Benjamin Abbott, Widow-Bewitched Abbott, Annette, Mrs. Annual, Bale, Bloomfield, Mrs. Bloomfield, Miss Brackett, Aristabulus Bragg, Brutus, Julius Brutus, Lucius Brutus, Ordeal Bumgrum, Commodore, D. O. V. E., Dickey, Steadfast Dodge, Captain Charles Ducie, Edson, Edward Effingham, Eve Effingham, John Effingham, Paul Effingham, Florio, Fun, Gray, Abijah Gross, Hammer, Mrs. Hawker, Mrs. Houston, Thomas Howel, Jarvis, Jane Jarvis, Jenny, Julietta, Captain Kant, Mrs. Legend, Longinus, Monday, Miss Monthly, Moreland, Moseley, Peter, Pierre, Pindar, Pith, Miss Ring, S. R. P., Ann Sidley, Summerfield, Sir George Templemore, Tom, Captain John Truck, Grace Van Cortlandt, Mile. Viefville, Walworth, Joe Wart, Wenham, Writ. cooper_found Black Mountain Saturday 01/16/2010 http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/cooper_found.html |