One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, a good Midwestern boy who finds himself running up against failure and disillusionment on every side in the days leading up to World War I. This is the book that won Cather the Pulitzer Prize and it was her best seller when it came out. It caused a lot of controversy as well with many critics feeling that Cather romanticized World War I. I think the critics were missing the point though; the last two sections of the book deal with Claude’s experiences of the War and it is, I think, rather jarring to see the way in which Cather writes about the beauties of the landscape and the high ideals of the conflict. But the entire point of the book, I think, is that Claude is an idealist in all the worst ways; he always believes too strongly in things and finds himself devastated when they fail to live up to his expectations. In the final chapter of this book, we see that disillusionment with the war & the military summed up nicely by Claude’s mother. Claude remains too close to his own perspectives to realize that disillusionment will come from this quarter as well, but his mother sees all too well the ugliness & tragedy of the war. It’s a daring move by Cather. One would anticipate the book ending with Claude finally coming to the realization of the tragedy of the War, but Cather ends the book without Claude ever coming to that realization; it’s only Claude’s mother who truly understands, even as the other characters struggle to do so, that the War is the tragedy of an entire generation of young men who are being destroyed by it. At well over 500 pages, the book is ultimately too long, I think; a lengthy section of the book takes place on the troop ship as Claude and his fellow soldiers are being shipped across the ocean to France and that section could have been cut down substantially. But Cather’s writing is top notch in other ways. Claude is one of her most layered characters yet and he’s her most frustratingly flawed to date as well, in the best sense of the word “flawed.” The section of the book given over to Claude’s courtship of and marriage to a young woman named Enid Royce is almost certainly the best and the scene of their wedding night is some of Cather’s best character writing yet, a brutal and bitter descent into frustrated disillusionment for Claude. The book doesn’t ever quite cohere as I think Cather wanted it to and, beautiful as much of it is, there’s simply too much in the way of extraneous material & too many undeveloped characters populate the edges of the story. Still, it’s a brilliant character portrait that remains challenging and unsettling in all the right ways. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – this book has some of Cather’s best character-based writing yet, but it struggles with a meandering plot; still, it remains gripping and compelling despite overlength. 3 ½ stars.