Maybe even 4.5* While I knew most of the plot from watching the excellent film adaptation (1942 directed by Orson Wells and starring Joseph Cotten), it was worthwhile reading the original novel. Tarkington is one of a small handful of authors who have won the Pulitzer Prize more than once and reading this novel, I could understand why.

Wells focused on the family drama in the film (and ended a few chapters short of the book!) but the book shows that Tarkington is more interested in the wider social commentary. Even with this wider focus, his portrayal of a pompous narcissist bully in Georgie Minafer is excellent and the book is worth reading for that alone. Georgie is not a caricature and I liked the fact that Tarkington showed him as human which allowed me to sympathize with him even when he was at his most annoying. Being a sentimentalist at heart, I liked the fact that the book allowed Georgie (now George) to be reprieved and possibly (hopefully) get back together with Lucy Morgan. ( )

An arrogant man child can't see past his imperious needs. He is blind to social and economic changes surrounding him. Pulitzer winner. ( )

Reason Read: Pulitzer winner, this was the winner of the Pulitzer in 1919. The story is about the time period after the civil war and the start of the 20th century. Industrialization is changing life and old money is being replaced by the "new money". The Ambersons are old money and the new money is Eugene Morgan. The contrast of horses and automobiles. The grandson is a spoiled arrogant individual who would rather be somebody than do something. This book may be set in the early years of the 20th century but it is easily applicable today. ( )

This is a really outstanding book, and has a pretty important theme, well-expressed. I don't know without checking if this was initially serialized, bc it does feel a little padded and repetitive in the middle--i.e. George and Fanny have the same conversation two or three times in the middle of the book, such that I thought I was repeating somehow.

I also don't care what was appropriate for the time, the narrator, not the characters, is casually dehumanizing and racist and it's deeply unsettling. ( )

This novel was not at all about what I had anticipated it would be, and surprised me in a very good way. Booth Tarkington is one of those names you know, you feel you certainly must have read, but then you realize you never have. I have two of his novels on my Pulitzer challenge, this one and [b:Alice Adams|525818|Alice Adams|Booth Tarkington|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1259541358s/525818.jpg|2197474]. I am looking forward to the second now that I have sampled the wares.

Written in 1918, [b:The Magnificent Ambersons|127028|The Magnificent Ambersons (The Growth Trilogy, #2)|Booth Tarkington|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1171925907s/127028.jpg|365539] is the story of George Amberson Minafer, a pompous, spoiled, arrogant little SOB who you want to smack around the ears, and who inspires that same desire in many of the people he meets. He is the grandson of a man who has made his own fortune and whose children take the money for granted and spend it. But the world is changing rapidly, the stock market is full of new opportunities, but fraught with risk; there are new inventions everywhere, but it is difficult to sort the ones that will succeed from the ones that won't and you might be tempted to bet that the horse and buggy isn’t going to be usurped by the automobile, much to your own dismay. In short, millionaires are being made and broken and the city is spreading outward, spurred by more mobility, and the influence of a single family is being diminished with the spread.

But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can’t have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us.

Substitute “computer” for “automobile” and you will see that we have witnessed the same kind of society change in our lifetimes. I’m not sure whether that comforts me or not, but it does put a different perspective on what I sometimes view as the out-of-control progress of our world, the progress that doesn’t stop to consider the harm that might be done along with the advancement.
There was so much here that I could relate to our own lives and times. Our economy is a shifting sand and technology did to many industries, two of which were my own mainstay, exactly what the auto did to horses.

The hubris of those who have inherited wealth, instead of earned wealth, is not something that has changed much either, and I could identify with the thrifty older people, who were viewed as miserly because they wanted their children to hold on to a little of the wealth instead of treating it like a well that could not go dry.

George is an enigma, in a way. He is arrogant and self-centered, but he is also proud and intelligent. He could do something with his life, had all the people in his family not treated him like he was a crown prince. Everyone suffers the consequences of the man they have created from the overindulged boy. In this world where we are always trying to buy our children more "things", I believe there is some good advice on child rearing in these pages, as well.

It’s been the same all his life: everything he did was noble and perfect. He had a domineering nature to begin with, and she let it go on, and fostered it till it absolutely ruled her. I never saw a plainer case of a person’s fault making them pay for having it!

You don’t want to like George, but at some point you do, because you feel sorry for him, knowing he is never going to build happiness without laying a solid foundation; but foundations are not something he thinks he needs, he believes his grandfather has laid a foundation that will support him forever. Of all the people who do not see George clearly, George is the worst offender. He never sees himself as he is and never stops to consider that “noble and perfect” might not be the adjectives that most people would readily apply to him.

I loved this quote, Eugene speaking of George:

That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity, dear; and I don’t pretend to know the answer. In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people’s opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can’t stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism. It just kills them.

Confess, you know someone like this, don’t you? I think all of us do.

I could go on quoting this book endlessly. I marked dozens of passages. I will not do that...I will only suggest that you might find it an interesting read if you have any empty space on your TBR. When I started writing this review, I had decided I was giving this a 4-star rating; by the time I got to this point, I realized I really thought it was an amazing book and that it deserved all 5-stars. I like a book that makes me think of things that go beyond the story itself, a book in which the characters are drawn clearly as individuals, but have that element that can make them stand for a society as a whole or a segment thereof.

I think the Pulitzer committee got this one right...they don’t always do that.
( )