cover image Alone in America: The Stories That Matter

Alone in America: The Stories That Matter

Robert A. Ferguson. Harvard Univ., $27.95 (296p) ISBN 978-0-674-06676-2

In this illuminating study, Columbia University professor Ferguson argues persuasively that loneliness has been a dominant theme in American literature virtually since Americans began writing. Concentrating on what he (by way of Emerson) refers to as "the lords of life" (failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss), he offers close readings of works from the early 19th century through the late 20th century, showing how these recurring issues, reflecting each era's zeitgeist, alienate characters from society and themselves. Rip Van Winkle awakens from his alcohol-induced slumber to find himself 20 years out of time. The heroines of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God suffer estrangement within their poorly made marriages. Ferguson is particular edifying in his chapter on immigrant novels, which acutely show the loss of home that he finds at the center of all manifestations of loneliness in American literature. Age, gender, race, and illness are presented as agents of isolation in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, and others. Ferguson invites the reader to look at classic fiction in a new light, and ponder the irony of so much loneliness in the literature of a country that champions self-reliance and the self-made man. (Jan.)