Review: THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty is a short novel, divided into four parts, set in Mount Salus, Mississippi.

 

Part 1:

Judge McKelva goes with his young 2nd wife, Fay, and his adult daughter, Lauren, to see an ophthalmologist in New Orleans because of sudden onset of vision problems caused by a retinal tear. The judge insists that the doctor do the surgery himself instead of waiting for a specialist to arrive in a few days. The surgery is successful but the recovery is grueling. It requires weeks of lying still and flat with the eyes covered. The judge, a great reader, is distraught by his inability to do anything at all and slips into a despondent depression. Lauren understands his maliase and tries to perk him up by reading aloud to him from a Dickens novel. Fay, on the other hand, is upset because she is missing Mardi Gras and wants to celebrate her birthday. In her irritation she attempts to rouse her husband by pulling him from his hospital bed. She isn't successful but the damage is down. The judge dies, probably from a heart attack.

Part 2: 

The two women bring the body of the judge back to Mount Salus and are met by McKelva friends and family to help prepare for and to attend the funeral. Fay doesn't feel accepted by these people and is irritated by their presence. On the day of the funeral, however, her whole family, the Chisoms, arrives from Madrid, Texas. The difference in social class between the two families is very apparent and the ruckus this family causes provides the comedy in the midst of the tragedy. Lauren is mortified that her father ever associated with these people. Fay makes sure that the judge is laid to rest in the new part of the cemetery, not in the plot with his first wife, even though it overlooks the new freeway and there are plastic poinsettias on the graves.

Part 3: 

Fay returns to Texas with her family for a few days. Lauren is alone in her childhood home for the first time in her life. She overhears some of her mother's friends making fun of Fay and her family, and she surprises herself that she feels the need to step in a correct the record and to stop the chatter, Later Lauren finds some of her mother's papers, photos, mementos. She thinks back on her mother's illness which led to blindness and alienation, and eventually an early death. She also allowed herself to reflect on her own situation -- losing her husband Phil in WWII and ruminating about what his life could have/should have been like. 

Part 4:

That night Lauren wakes from a dream and realizes it was a memory of the train trip she took with Phil from Chicago to Mount Salus for their wedding. At one point they looked out the window at the river and could see the point at which the Ohio River joined the Mississippi River, becoming one. "All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world. And they themselves were a part of the confluence" (159-160). Even though Phil was no longer with her, he could still tell her of her life which was a continuity of its love. This memory soothed her. Later Fay returns and the two women quarrel over a wrecked breadboard, a gift from Phil to her mother, and bicker over who killed the judge. Was it Lauren with her insistence that the judge lie still to the point of death or was it Fay who wanted him to quit his old man foolishness and get up. In the end Fay, with all her silly and inane ways, gets the house. And Lauren, by ending the fight and retaining her honor and her values, gets to keep her dignity and the promise that her memories still survive and can soothe her.

The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973. I wanted to read it for that reason alone. As I started the book I could actually feel my eyes rolling wondering why the committee picked a book with such a downer topic and a slow pace. Then, around part 3, I came to recognize the book held some universal truths about society, about class, and poverty and old money. I chided myself for being too quick to judge the book before I even finished it. In the end I found the book very touching and, this won't surprise anyof my readers, I cried several tears.

My rating: 4 stars.

-Anne