So, after a SNAFU of leaving my book accidentally in Florida and then getting myself hooked on a new series a week afterward, I have finally finished
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction in 1947. All 659 glorious pages.
First off, I feel my reaction to the novel is somewhat tainted in that I couldn't get into an easy rhythm while reading it. Warren has the novel split into 10 "chapters" that each span no less than 50 pages. This division of the book made it hard to find natural pauses in the narrative to pause my own reading in between sittings, which is never my favorite way to read.
Turning my attention now to the novel itself, I feel very much at a middle ground with it. I neither loved nor hated it. I see it's literary merit and applaud Warren for masterful writing, but could not find my own hook or level with which to bond to in the novel.
Often in my reading I found myself remembering
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Though not as a result of the prose. Warren is far more verbose and descriptive than Hemingway, but writes his characters with the same sense of malaise and clinical detachment. Not to mention the overt misogyny enjoyed in both novels.
What struck me most about the novel was the acute and almost antiseptic observation and commentary that Warren achieves of American politicians and politics. Willie "the Boss" Stark, his caricature of corrupt Louisiana governor Huey Long, offers a story arc that is almost a parable on how politics and power corrupts a man. But, what I found more probing and disturbing even was the description of the reaction of Stark's staff, seen through the eyes of his go-to man Jack Burden, and the public of Louisiana.
Warren offers up a treatise on mob mentality and the fantasy of politics that the American public applied to politics then. What chilled me most was that it is still relevant now. Willie Stark lives his life of corruption almost openly, sending Jack Burden on errands that lead to the downfall of numerous careers and lives. Stark also manages a public reputation of "tom-catting," yet his numerous extra-marital affairs and his corrupt politics do not seem to phase the good people of Louisiana. As long as Willie maintains his marriage to his backwoods sweetheart, promote his all-American football hero son, and focus his silver-tongued speeches on his work for the common man, he retains his valor in the public eye.
Even Jack, his trusted advisor, who has watched the full spectrum of his career is complacent with the Boss's doings. Only when one hits too close to home does he begin to question the Boss he knows now, not the ideological man he knew from the start.
Warren's novel definitely encourages the reader to question their own views (maybe even their ennui) on politics, which resonates now as it did in his time.
Overall feelings: chilling look at the American political scene, yet hard to slog through.
