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When it comes to reading, I don’t have the stamina I once had. When I was younger, I read anything and everything, but now I’ve grown fussy and particular. I’ll read the first chapter of a book and if it doesn’t seem promising, I’ll drop it. Recently, because it was part of a Norway Memorial Library book discussion series, I began to read William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy. At the end of the first chapter, Mrs. Macauley, a widow, is hanging out her wash. Her four-year-old son, Ulysses, has found a fresh hen’s egg. The last sentence of the first chapter says this: “He looked at it a moment, picked it up, brought it to his mother and very carefully handed it to her, by which he meant what no man can guess and no child can remember to tell.” I turned on the lamp, propped my feet up, snuggled down into my chair, and kept reading. The time is the beginning of World War Two; the place, a small town in California. Mrs. Macauley’s oldest son, Marcus, has joined the Army. To help support the family, her next son, Homer, fourteen, takes an after school job delivering telegrams. Telegrams were the email of the 1940s. Email is private, supposedly, but with telegrams there are no such pretenses. If you send a telegram, a number of strangers are definitely going to read it. First, there is the clerk at the counter. Telegrams are charged by the word, so no matter how shocking or sentimental or embarrassing or private the message, the clerk has to count the words, look you in the eye, and tell you what you owe. The clerk then hands the message to the telegraph operator who taps it out in code, one letter at a time. At the other end, another stranger interprets the code, types up the message and puts it in a little envelope. And then there’s the messenger. I would think that a boy who bicycles across town, rings a doorbell, and announces, “Telegram!” would know exactly what he is delivering. Homer does. Delivering personal messages that are boiled down to their essence - in most cases only a few sentences - would give a fourteen-year-old boy a lot to think about, particularly when he has to deliver telegrams that begin, “The War Department regrets to inform you....” With no television coverage of the fighting (no television at all!), these death telegrams make the war real to Homer and bring into sharp focus the vulnerability of his brother. But there’s more to the novel than Homer’s telegrams. There’s Homer’s little brother Ulysses who has a talent for observation. There’s an ancient school teacher (teaching Ancient History) who is as intent on enriching her students’ souls as she is on enlightening their minds. There’s Homer’s boss, Mr. Spangler, who though safe in California thousands of miles away from the fighting, nonetheless finds himself at the wrong end of a gun. There’s Rosalie Simms-Peabody (pronounce Pibity) whose bio reads like a lead character in a TV series, but whose bona fides we have reason to doubt. And there’s my favorite character, Lionel Cabot. If the entire book consisted of only the chapter where Lionel takes Ulysses to the library to show him the books, it would still be worth full price. The Human Comedy is not considered one of the great novels. Most notable among its flaws is it’s somewhat unlikely ending. However, to me, the true measure of a novel is that when I reflect on its characters and circumstances, I have to stop what I’m.... |