Did Lou And Oscar Go To The Beach

Alexandra Bergson, a teenaged girl, lives with her brothers and parents on a farm outside Hanover, Nebraska, a small town on the prairie. Alexandra's father is ill, and during a ride back from Hanover with Carl Lindstrom, a teenaged neighbor and good friend, she confesses her worries about her father's likely death. Her father does indeed soon die but not before expressing his confidence in Alexandra's ability to preserve the farm and take a large hand in running it. She capably does both, expanding the property, making the farm productive, and skillfully supervising her brothers, Oscar, Lou, and young Emil. As the dreamy Emil grows up, he retains his childhood affection for the beautiful Marie Tovesky, but she marries an intensely jealous
Her trademark style is essentially oral and colloquial, with few of the elaborate clauses, complicated syntax, abstract phrasing, and self-conscious cogitation that one associates, for instance, with the work of Henry James, an author she greatly admired. It is hard to imagine James writing convincingly about characters as apparently "simple" as the young Alexandra and Carl, just as it is also difficult to imagine James writing speech as consistently plain as Carl's question "Did Lou and Oscar go to the Blue to cut wood today?" To say this is not to criticize James; rather, it is simply to call attention to the relative plainness and clarity that helped give Cather's novels much of their original (and subsequent) appeal. Her language seems as clear and uncluttered as the prairies she describes, and she focuses—in this passage as in so much of her writing elsewhere—on basic archetypal issues, such as family, friendship, life, death, survival, and especially one's relations with nature—relations on which everything, ultimately, depends. Neither Carl nor Alexandra is the kind of sophisticated, educated, cultured character one often finds in the writings of James, but both of them seem instantly and credibly human in their behavior, speech, aspirations, and
Those clauses are also convincingly colloquial; they have the flavor of real, credible speech. Carl becomes, paradoxically, a spokesman for a whole lonely crowd of isolated figures like himself: "When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him." Partly this statement implies that land for burials is scarce and expensive in big cities; partly it implies that the dead person is often a stranger to the other locals, with no established family burial plot. In either case, Carl claims, the "landlady and the delicatessen man" are the only mourners, perhaps because they (rather than family or neighbors) are the only persons with whom the dead person had regular contact, or perhaps simply because they will mourn the loss of the dead person's commerce. In any case, Carl seems to imply (a bit unconvincingly) that people in large cities lack spouses or large families or wide circles of acquaintances (when often, of course, the opposite was true), and when he speaks of lonely city-dwellers, he seems to imagine only people like himself: artists or artisans who earn their incomes not from hard manual labor but from carefully cultivated talents. Thus, Carl says that when people like himself die, "we leave nothing behind us but a frockcoat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by." Likewise,