The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein

This is now a history of a number of men and women from their beginning to their ending; these will have then the last touch of being that a history of any one can give to them, sometime it will be that any one who ever was or is or will be living, sometime then it will be even if they have had only a very little of any living, sometime then it will be that every one will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them, sometime then in my feeling there will be a history of every kind of men and women, there will be a history of every one from the beginning to their ending, every one will have sometime before the ending the last touch of a being a history of them can give to anyone.

First of all, yes, it's all like that. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans is one of the most baffling books I've ever read. The vocabulary is simple, but the sentences are mazes of repetition that lurch sometimes into ungrammatical thickets or contradict themselves. Ove rand over again, Stein gives minor variations on the same sentence, with new clauses added or slightly adjusted, and then again and again, for paragraphs and pages. The structure is all like the passage above, making large claims about men and women, their living, their being, their history, etc., etc. The vocabulary is simple, even to a fault, but the experience of reading 400 pages of sentences like these manages to strip these simple words--living, history, being, men, women, even eating, drinking, etc.--down to an alien aspect.

The story--there is a story, despite everything--focuses on Alfred Hersland and his marriage to Julia Dehning. Stein begins by telling the story of their marriage, which, despite being unsuccessful seems rather unremarkable, and then expanding outward to tell the story of the whole Hersland family, including Alfred's grandparents, parents, and his siblings Martha and David. It extends also to many of the minor figures who people the lives of the Herslands, including friends and servants; we're told over and over again (and I mean literally a hundred times at least) that the Herslands are wealthy but choose to live in a section of Gossols, Stein's fictionalized version of Oakland, California, where no other rich people live. This is an interesting detail, but the lives of the Herslands are otherwise pointedly unremarkable, and unremarkable in a way that allows Stein to take them as avatars of the human condition that is the real subject of the book. (The title's claim that the book is about American lives seems even too limited.)

If I got something out of the book--and I can't claim to have gotten a great deal--it's this idea: that at their heart, human beings are not so different from one another. For Stein, everyone has an essential being (she uses the term "at bottom") that is shared with other people of the same "type"; a personality may be a mix of these different types, but it presents nothing unique or new. Human identity is a kind of repetition, a repetition that mirrors the repetition of the prose. There's a kind of beauty in this, Stein suggests (I think), in that it unites all people into a common being and history. Over and over again, Stein remarks that at some point there will be a full history of all human beings, suggesting that The Making of Americans is a step toward the project of understanding not just humans but humanity.

But I could be wrong. Frankly, this book defeated me like few other books ever have. Outside of a few flashes of interest, or the smooth wear of the prose dulling my senses as it wired my brain, I can't say I enjoyed it.