Cather’s second novel is a real expansion on O Pioneers, her first. O Pioneers is, as I’ve said before, a book without an ounce of fat, with not a single word that shouldn’t be there. Of course, it’s under two-hundred pages; The Song of the Lark is very nearly three times the length of O Pioneers and it’s certainly not the perfect achievement of her first novel. But it is a great novel, I think. It’s the story of Thea Kronberg. The novel begins when she’s eleven, growing up the small town of Moonstone, Colorado, and follows her as a love of music leads her out into the wider world to pursue a career as a singer. The book doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of plot; there’s a lengthy section in the middle of the book where Thea visits the Southwestern United States and the story essentially grinds to a halt to follow her as she kicks about ancient ruins for an incredibly long time, but the prose of the book is so beautiful in general that it pulls you along and that section is immersive and hypnotic in a really beautiful way. The character work is stellar and it kept me reading voraciously for over 500 pages. It was less that I wanted to know what was going to happen next as that I wanted to know how the characters were going to feel next. Thea herself is a really complex character and the supporting cast also has some really great characters, like Howard Archie, the town doctor of Moonstone, and Fred Ottenberg, a young society man who enters the novel at about the half-point as a seemingly shallow, frivolous person who then has a lot of really interesting development. The book is split into six sections and Cather kind of disavowed the sixth section in her later life, musing that the book might have been better if it had just ended at the end of the fifth section. I think the sixth section really elevates the book myself; there’s a bit of a twist at the very beginning of the sixth section and as the book explores that shift, it becomes darker and more emotionally complicated than the first five sections. The fifth section ends on a note of hopefulness and joy and it would indeed have been a good ending, but letting the sixth section dig deeper allows the book to reach a still optimistic, but more nuanced and emotionally shaded ending. I will agree with Cather about the epilogue, which should absolutely have been cut. But even with the few flaws found here, the book is still a real masterpiece, more ambitious then O Pioneers and, even if it is less perfect, still striking, engrossing and evocative. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Cather’s second novel is more ambitious and much longer than her first; it’s not a perfect achievement, but it’s an engrossing & beautiful character study. 4 stars.