My Antonia has an interesting frame story in which the book is presented as a manuscript put together by Jim Burden, the main character, as a remembrance of the title character, Antonia Shimerda, a girl he knew as a child when they both lived on the Nebraska plains. This is considered one of Cather’s best books, maybe her very best, but I found it to be the first real disappointment of her novels/novellas. The book, I think, is somehow based on the premise that Antonia is representative of the pioneer spirit or something along those lines. But I found her to be an incredibly bland character who didn’t really stand out at all. One problem is that the book features an incredibly large cast of characters and, at under two-hundred pages, seems to be constantly introducing someone new or shuffling someone else away and Antonia herself actually disappears from the book for a whole chapter at a time here and there. I hate to invoke an adaptation, given how much Cather hated the adaptations of her work that she saw during her lifetime, but it seems worth mentioning that the actress who plays Antonia in the 1995 film version of the book is billed NINTH on the cast list which kind of indicates the degree to which she is never really central to this book or Jim’s coming of age story. This really throws the whole enterprise off; if we don’t understand why Antonia is so important, then we can’t really understand the narrator as a character either – obviously he think she’s vitally important to the story of his life (and maybe the story of America itself) but as readers, we’re damned if we can figure out why. So, this leads to both the main character and the titular character being really bland and inscrutable. This is a problem. It’s particularly strange because Cather has been so good at creating really compelling, full-blooded female characters in both of her previous novels. Another weird detail is that My Antonia is so far the first of Cather’s novels/novellas to be narrated in the first person, meaning we are, in theory, getting really into the head of the main character, but of all of Cather’s main characters so far (Bartley Alexander, Alexandra Bergson & Thea Kronberg) I feel like I understand Jim Burden the least. Even the supporting characters in her other books and the main characters in some of her short stories, like A Death in the Desert or A Wagner Matinee, are more complex and interesting. The one thing Cather can still do is evoke a sense of time and place; her prose while talking about the exterior elements of the Nebraska plains is absolutely astounding and whether she’s talking about a graveside service taking place during a bitterly cold snowstorm or the way the shadows fall across the prairie as the orange light of the sun setting floods across the plains, she absolutely puts you there in a breathtaking and wonderful way. But as to the characters and story, I found them both absolutely flat. It’s genuinely kind of baffling to me that this book is so beloved and acclaimed; it is, of her longer fiction that I’ve read, by far the most superficial, not to say shallow, in terms of its approach to character and emotion. Even at around two hundred pages, I had to struggle to finish this one; The Song of the Lark clocked in at over 500 and I absolutely devoured it. Apparently, something in this book touches a lot of people, but that personal, emotional element indicated by the title is nowhere to be found from what I can see. Apparently, Antonia has neatly slipped my grasp. 2 stars.
tl;dr – flatly characterized, overstuffed, emotionally shallow and uninteresting, this short novel is a slog; this one’s way down on the list of Cather’s bibliography, despite some gorgeous prose. 2 stars.