Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1931, although it is rated an astonishingly low 11449th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, I liked it, even if I was not ecstatic about it, especially when it got too long, winding on beyond the point where it should have stopped – you find thousands of reviews on magnum opera from the GOAT and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel, if you care to visit
Years of
Grace by Margaret Ayer won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1931, although
it is rated an astonishingly low 11449th on The Greatest Books of
All Time site, I liked it, even if I was not ecstatic about it, especially when
it got too long, winding on beyond the point where it should have stopped – you
find thousands of reviews on magnum opera from the GOAT and other lists on my
blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel, if you care to
visit
8 out of 10
I remember a
critique made by Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/03/take-girl-like-you-by-magister-ludi.html regarding the ‘Checkoff formula: you
take a lot of characters, all miserable because of something they won't do, and
let them talk without influencing each other for three acts, and at the last
moment you introduce some arbitrary calamity, or some proposed change like a
return to Petrograd or a holiday in the Cry-mere, which you know won't make any
difference to any of them, and then you go on for ten minutes or so after the
thing should have stopped even by your own standards, to show how delicate and
unemphatic your art is’
Applied to
Years of Grace, that would mean that the Pulitzer Prize Winner was quite good,
after all, I have managed to read the about six hundred pages, and I have been
very reluctant to take on more that three hundred pages at a time, over the
past few years, but it should have ended sometime before Years of Grace become
pages to avoid
Alice Adams https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/alice-adams-by-booth-tarkington.html is another Pulitzer Prize Winner
that came to mind, although this one was better, Jane Ward, the heroine of
Years of Grace has seduced me, in the first chapters of the novel, but then we
stayed too long with her, as I said
As a
teenager, she falls in love with Andre, but her parents do not allow them to
marry, this was taking place more than one hundred years ago, and even today,
there are laws that prevent the under aged to take such steps – well, if you
are not in one of those MAGA states, and in tyrannies where they even have
traditions like that
Later, Jane
Ward would meet Jimmy Trent, who is married to her best friend, Agnes, while
the main character is herself the spouse of Stephen Carver, and the pressure
there comes from One Fat Englishman https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/06/one-fat-englishman-by-kingsley-amis-is.html at least I was reminded of it
Jimmy Trent
is like Macher from One Fat Englishman, they both insist on taking action, do
not think too much, just be natural, ‘go for it’, nevertheless, Jane agrees to
elope in the first place, but then changes her mind – she would have three
children, they grow up, we stay with this oh, so long narrative till she is
over fifty
Spoiler
alert, although I cannot see how somebody will read this and then decide to
take this rather obscure now volume (only 11, 449th on The Greatest
Books of All Time site) and they would be railed to find that I say Cicily will
break the marriage that her mother would not, and under some quite unlikely circumstances:
cousins marry, then there are three children on each side, and Cicily divorces
and marries…the husband of her best friend, ok, I know that happens, but then
this was quite some time ago and, I don’t know, but I do not buy it https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/according-to-mark-by-penelope-lively.html
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