Cather, Willa. The Professor's House. (1925.) New York: Vintage, 1973.

This might be my favorite Cather book so far, mostly because of the structure of it. Pages 11 through 179 (about half the book) are the story of Professor St. Cloud not wanting to move out of his old house into the new one he and his wife bought, now that their daughters have grown and married and moved away. There's much going on with these daughters and their rivalrous husbands and Paris and patents and other good things. But then the story moves to the diary of Tom Outland, a character that's hovered in the shadows up to now. In a very Catherian way he's been the center of attention and yet never seen directly, just discussed through varying levels of third-person narration. But then the second part of the book is Outland's diary, which is of course written in the first person, and then once this is done we have about 20 pages of this wonderfully elegaic end that takes place almost entirely in the spinning consciousness of the professor. It's amazing how well it works; writing about it like this makes the thing seem terribly flimsy.

Again, here, Cather's got these great moments of precise, yet understated observation. At one point the wealthy husband who always wants to be liked watches the professor leave the room with an acquaintance. Willa treats it thus: "He stood gazing wistfully after them, like a little boy told to go to bed" (43). Because I'm not a good writer and even worse of a teacher, I would have told a student who wrote such a sentence to describe the look more visually, but here it's clear that such a thing would ruin the effect, that the boy does the necessary visual and emotional work at the same time. Later, as this same wealthy husband and his wife (the professor's daughter) are having an argument in the car, Cather suddenly cuts to the back seat: "St. Peter was very uncomfortable" (168). I dunno, am I being pointless? Maybe these need to be read in context, but this book is full of such well-spoken joys. Cather's such an economic writer; that is, a writer of great economy (though she writes often about economics). I'm not always interested in this, but I can appreciate it when I see it.