Classic Review: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

A Death in the Family by James Agee was the 1958 Pulitzer Prize winning fiction book. Published after the author's death it is thought to be semi-autobiographical. This fact sort of haunted me as I read the book and still does one month later as I sit down to review it.

The story, A Death in the Family, is told from the perspective of Rufus Follett, a young school-aged boy of no more than six years. The year is 1915. The setting is Knoxville, Tennessee. A telephone call in the middle of the night wakes the small family of four. It is the father's brother, Ralph, calling Jay to tell him that their father is very ill, possibly dying. Jay makes the ominous decision to leave immediately, even though it is still the dark of night, to make the journey to attend to his own parent.  After a quick breakfast with his wife, Mary, Jay heads out with a promise he will return before the kids are in bed the next day. He never makes it home. Jay dies in a single car accident when some part of the steering mechanism breaks loose, killing him instantly in the ensuing crash.

The rest of the story takes place in the following hours and days after the death is discovered as the bereaved family copes with all the decisions of what to do with the body, where the funeral will be, and how to go on. By and large Rufus and his younger sister are shoved off to the side, as the adults gather round Mary to help her make decisions. But being told to sit down and be quiet doesn't help a child to understand what is happening and how to proceed from this step forward. Rufus is left in the dark, confused and afraid.

It is a heartbreaking story, one the author had to live himself. When he was six his beloved father died in a car accident. A year later he and his sister were both sent off to boarding schools. In one scene in the book, a Catholic priest comes to the house presumably to talk about the funeral, but the priest casts his unkind eyes on the children correcting them about some issue or another. I got the creepy feeling, perhaps unfounded, that this scene provided foreshadowing for what was ahead for the children -- parochial schools taught by unkind, judgmental teachers.

At another point in the book older children taunt young Rufus saying they heard the father (Jay) was drunk and that was why he was in the accident. Rufus tries to intervene on his own behalf saying it was the steering mechanism. But a memory intrudes. Rufus recalled a time when he was younger when he was taken by his father to a bar where his father tossed back several drinks and then told Rufus to never tell his mother where they went. In addition, the phone call from Ralph, which started the whole chain of deadly events, was probably precipitated because Ralph was drunk when he called. Alcohol was an issue in this family. The author never definitively discounts the story of driving drunk, which leaves it as an open question.

When I learned A Death in the Family was semi-autobiographical I did a little research on the author. Though James Agee was a modestly successful writer and a successful film critic, his personal life was a shambles. He died in 1955 from a heart attack, at age 45 years. He was a heavy smoker and an alcoholic. He had been working on this book for years, so his publisher was able to put the story together in some cohesive form and publish it posthumously. Clearly this publisher did a good job since the book won the Pulitzer Prize the next year and has not been out of print since then.

The tragic early death of James Agee got me thinking about events in life which abruptly change one's trajectory. A boy's father dies young and that boy's life spins off in a new direction, often untethered from the security that home and parents provide. We had such a tragedy in our family. A relative's daughter lost her husband in a tragic way. Her son was preschool aged at the time. I often worry about this boy. Can his mother and grandparents provide him with the stability he needs to keep him from spinning off in a new, possibly terrible, direction? I pray so.

Sometimes I marvel at the books still on high school reading lists after more than a half century. I don't wonder about A Death in the Family. There are so many themes that need to be probed: death, religious fanaticism, children as thinking/feeling beings, alcoholism, etc. It is not a cheery story but one certainly worthy of many good class discussions.

My rating: 4 stars.

-Anne