Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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Summary: And now for something completely different
Review: What is this thing?!?!? - As John Hersey says in the introduction (page xxviii), "There had never been, and there will never be, anything quite like this book."-On the back cover, a dashing Agee is pictured with a glass of what one presumes to be a shot of the strong stuff in his hand. Appropriately, because the writing resembles nothing so much as an (at times) divinely inspired inebriety. He bounces from one form of writing to the next (poetry, descriptive prose, vituperative essay) without so much as a feint of a segue. There is really no narrative form to speak of. It seems clear (to me at least) that Agee didn't know himself what he was doing at times, and the striking pictures of Evans never seem to connect in the way they should with Agee's prose. It's rather like the characters in James Dickey's Deliverence stumbled out into a swath of impoverished farmland to write a book and take some pictures rather than into a soon-to-be dammed up river to take an ill-advised canoe trip. (One is not surprised, somehow, to learn that Agee was one of Dickey's great literary heroes.) ....And yet, for all the muddle, or perhaps because of it, the book has a disconcerting charm that will not let one be. I don't know where to pinpoint it or how to analyze it. But it's there, like some mischievous elf standing before your eyes who will not leave no matter how many times you open and shut your eyes and shake your head...There is a paragraph in the "On The Porch" section toward the end of the book, describing a girl in the dawning of her sexuality: "A phase so unassailably beyond any meaning of tenderness and of trust, so like the opening of the first living upon the shining of the young earth in its first morning..." In the book's finest moments, in Agee's best sections of writing, we feel this painfully fleeting innocence and bliss wafting over the lives of the simple and hard-bitten tenant farmers, a presence almost physical amidst the cruel hardships they endure. Perhaps this is part of the book's mysterious hold on generations of readers.

Rating:
Summary: Read it? YES --- Praise it? NO
Review: Yes, Agee has an exceptional ability to use language. Yes, this novel is a "must read" for anyone interested in Depression-Era literature. No, it is not a good book, precisely for the same reason it is frequently recommended, namely, it's language.
Agee is understandably distressed by the inability of language to adequately express the plight of the families he portrays. However, he does not merely acknowledge this and move on, he rather writes an entire book about his inability to write. For someone interested in theory this might be interesting, but for someone interested in better understanding tenant farmers in the early 20th century, this is not the place to go. Although his intentions may be good, Agee's angst becomes primary in the text, even to the point of superseding the families' troubles. In the end, Agee is more concerned with how he is affected by his subject than by his subject in and of itself. See Orwell's THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER for a superb treatment of a similar topic.