Mrs. Egg and Other Americans : Collected Stories

Rating:
Summary: Adventures of an Ohio farm family in the Twenties.
Review: Thomas Beer was known for academic books such as "The Mauve Decade," but paid the rent by writing short stories for national magazines. This book is a collection of many of his stories. By far the best is the series about the Egg family, a farm family in a fictional Ohio town. This somewhat unusual family consists of the matriarch, a common-sense woman who is a fantastic cook, her son Adam, and her three married daughters who drift in and out of the stories as the plot requires.

The stories are all long by present-day standards and the plots can be somewhat melodramatic, but they are extremely readable nonetheless. The value of these stories to me lies in their wealth of detail about everyday life in the twenties. Throwaway sentences tell the reader that the farmhouse is not yet wired for electricity, that the Eggs use gas jets and light their way to bed with flashlights, that they have an ice chest instead of a refrigerator, and so on. (No television or radio - the high point of the week is driving to town for the silent movie show!) The characters and family dynamics are also well written; many of the stories are told through the point of view of Mrs. Egg, Adam's mother. I felt transported to this time and this town while reading these stories, and can highly recommend them - although the other stories in the book aren't particularly readable. Out of print, but try a good library.