A guilty pleasure

One of my character flaws is that I enjoy a well-written 'problem' novel. These are books whose aim is to persuade you to take a side on some particular social issue. For instance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book that was written to explain why slavery should be abolished.1

I've had many people claim to me that problem novels are always bad, and that any political or social aim is incompatible with literary quality. My rejoinder has always been, "But then...why am I able to perceive goodness in some of these novels?"

That's the thing, I am not trying to argue that this type of novel can be good; I am just describing the fact that I do indeed perceive literary quality in many of these books.

A few months ago I read Dorothy Canfield Fisher's 1924 novel The Home-Maker. This book is about a shrewish house-wife who goes to work in a department store after her hen-pecked husband takes a fall that cripples him.

Fisher wrote the book to illustrate the point that some people have a character that is suited for work, and some people have a character that is suited for home-making. This housewife is unhappy because she's forced to expend her ambitions on baking and child-rearing, resulting in a brittle perfectionism that makes her husband and kids miserable.

The novel begins:

She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times! Warned him, and begged of him, and implored him to be careful. The children simply paid no attention to what she said. None. She might as well talk to the wind. Hot grease too! That soaked into the wood so. She would never get it clean.

Similarly, her husband is a dreamer, and he learns, when he's injured, that he really enjoys spending time with his kids. His youngest son has been wild and unmanageable, but when his father starts to pay attention to the kid's internal life, the kid suddenly becomes more tractable.

Here's the father discovering that his youngest son has been anxious for months because his mother had threatened to take away the son's Teddy-Bear:

Lester was so horrified

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