My Antonia by Willa Cather

"Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world.  I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man.  The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it.  You really are a part of me."

She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly.  "How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I've disappointed you so?  Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?..."

Let me say two first things about reading My Antonia: 1.) I meant to read O Pioneers! instead, to complete a trio of books with exclamation points, after Swamplandia! and Gef!.  I forgot that my copy of O Pioneers! fell apart before I could get back to reading it.  2.) I tried to read O Pioneers! years ago, when I was driving through Nebraska, but I could barely get started.  Nebraska was too flat, too long, too featureless; to read about it at the same time was almost overwhelming.  I felt like Jim Burden, the young boy in My Antonia who moves to Nebraska to live with his grandparents, whose first impression of the state is that "[t]he only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska."

But I'm glad my attempts to read O Pioneers! fell apart, and I had to resort to my copy of My Antonia instead, because this is one tremendously beautiful book.  The narrator and protagonist is Jim, who grows up out there, first among the fields and farms and then in the town of Black Hawk (I assume this is a version of Cather's hometown of Red Cloud), but the story revolves around Antonia Shimerda, the slightly older Czech girl whose family travels to Nebraska on the same train as Jim.  Jim and Antonia begin their life on the prairie at the exact same moment, and while their experiences are different--Antonia struggles at first under the poverty of the immigrant, while Jim thrives in his grandparent's home--their lives are forever bound up with one another.

My understanding is that Jim is a version of Cather herself: like him, she was born in Virginia, moved to Nebraska as a young child, and although she drifted away to New York and did not return, Nebraska kept its hold on her spirit and imagination.  (There's probably a few good articles about Cather's reimagining herself as a boy, probably with the word queering in the title...)  Cather's prose is so pellucid and striking, as spare as Hemingway's and a clear forerunner of writers like Marilynne Robinson, and she uses it here to fashion some pretty breathtaking descriptions of the prairie:

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea.  The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.  And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

There's some drama in Antonia's life: she ends up being used and impregnated by a railway conductor who has no intention to marry her, and her life as an adult threatens to be as hard as her life as a child.  But those developments are late in the novel, and it's not really that kind of book.  Like Death Comes for the Archbishop, My Antonia meanders and plods, more interested in providing a full and complex image of life on the prairie than it is conflict or a single narrative thread.  Tragedies, like Antonia's father's death or her jilting and pregnancy, interrupt the story as they do life, but they do seem like interruptions: they're like the immense snake that a young Jim kills in defense of Antonia in the midst of exploring the prairie.

What keeps the narrative together, beyond its terrific evocation of Nebraska, is the relationship between Jim and Antonia.  He teaches her English as a boy, they become friends, and briefly enemies; when he moves to Black Hawk she becomes one of the "country girls" whose companionship isn't quite seen up to his level.  At one point he professes his love for her, but romantic interest is just another passing phase in their relationship.  I was struck by the passage I quoted above, which captures the complexity and breadth of their relationship.  Antonia might have been "a sweetheart, a wife, or my mother or my sister," but any of these labels would impose something on their relationship that might kill or stunt it.  Even the word "friend" isn't quite right: to Jim, she is only "My Antonia."