Emil Miller
11-09-2012, 04:33 PM
This Pulitzer prize winning novel is something of a hybrid insofar as what should have been a riveting tale of pork barrel politics in a poor southern state, is more the narrator’s story than that of the protagonist Willie Stark: the demagogic farm labourer who claws his way up the political ladder to become state governor.
Jack Burden, the narrator, is an unlikeable individual who flunks his degree, walks out on his wife and gives up his job as reporter for a small town newspaper to become a fixer for Stark’s populist and brutally uncompromising political machine: a decision that eventually leads to scandal, suicide and assassination.
The seedy opportunists of state politics are contrasted with the upright citizens of Burden’s Landing, a residential district and Jack’s birthplace, which also has its seamy underside: as Jack discovers when on an assignment for Stark.
Unfortunately, the story is submerged in a welter of repetitious philosophical musings on his own existence and life in general that rambles on for 600+ pp; leaving the impression that the narrator’s self-indulgence has ruined what could have been a great novel.
Jack Burden, the narrator, is an unlikeable individual who flunks his degree, walks out on his wife and gives up his job as reporter for a small town newspaper to become a fixer for Stark’s populist and brutally uncompromising political machine: a decision that eventually leads to scandal, suicide and assassination.
The seedy opportunists of state politics are contrasted with the upright citizens of Burden’s Landing, a residential district and Jack’s birthplace, which also has its seamy underside: as Jack discovers when on an assignment for Stark.
Unfortunately, the story is submerged in a welter of repetitious philosophical musings on his own existence and life in general that rambles on for 600+ pp; leaving the impression that the narrator’s self-indulgence has ruined what could have been a great novel.