Alice Adams

 Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington

Alice Adams, tired of being a poor nobody (...not really poor, just less rich than her friends), has set her hopes on the high life. She and her grasping mother hope Alice will raise the Adams' standing in society by marrying a rich somebody. Her only other option would be to enroll in the dreaded local business college to learn a marketable skill. She is horrified at the very thought.

At a party she meets Arthur Russel, who takes an immediate interest and courts her throughout the summer. Their time together is spent on the Adams' front porch because Alice doesn't want him to see the inside of the shabby house or to meet her father who is not as well-to-do as Alice has let on. She has let on a lot of things. 

Eventually the mother insists on Arthur coming to dinner, which turns out to be one of the most awkward, disasterous social occasions ever. It was painful to read. Every illusion Alice and her mother have so carefully built comes crashing down. Arthur sees who they really are and comes to visit Alice one more time, both of them understanding it will be the last. 

Alice's mother blames her husband, Virgil, and guilts him into going into business for himself to increase his income and make his children's lives easier. But to do that he has to steal a formula from his long-time boss, who, of course, eventually finds out and is not amused. Meanwhile Alice's brother, Walter, working for the same company as his father, robs his employer and takes off, leaving Virgil responsible for that debt as well as his own theft. 

In a wonderful, if unlikely, turn of events, the boss forgives Virgil and offers to buy his business, making it possible for Virgil to pay Walter's debt and avoid prison. Even better, he gives Virgil his old job back with a raise in pay. Isn't fiction great?  

Alice, her illusions of grandeur shattered, faces up to real life and finds it not so bad after all. She decides to enroll in the business school so she can get a job to help support the family. The ending is fairly positive, lessons learned and all that, for everyone but Walter. He and the money are still missing.

Unfortunately none of the characters were very relatable, or even likeable really. They are more caricatures than real people so it was hard to make any emotional connection with them. I've read several other Tarkington books and found the same thing in all of them, and yet there's something about them I like. I enjoy his writing and the era he's writing in and about, and the situations he puts his characters into and seeing how they respond to them makes for good stories. I guess the bottom line is I find them pleasant reading, realistic or not.  

Alice Adams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, is available to read free of charge at Gutenberg Press here: gutenberg.org