The Magnificent Ambersons: Indianapolis's Novel

Reading the always interesting Armond White's take on the latest Sight and Sound greatest films poll, I was struck by his reference to the fact that "For years, it’s been quietly accepted that Welles’ follow-up film The Magnificent Ambersons was richer, more complex than Kane (and Ambersons’ profundity makes Vertigo seem piddling)." While I have never seen the film, I suppose I should, as I consider its source material an excellent novel. 

Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Amberson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1918. The short author biography in my copy seems to imply Tarkington was a highly popular figure in his day, author of serials Broadway plays, and novels. If true, the evidence of this book suggests it was for good reason, for it is the definitive Indianapolis novel. However, I have heard the film mentioned far more often than the novel.  

Tarkington's narrative skillfully portrays the social upending of the Industrial Age on the pre-manufacturing old society of the Midwest. It focuses on the deterioration of a leading old-money Midwestern family, and where the town's economic development leaves them in the end.

Throughout,  Tarkington interweaves economic usurpation with romantic conflict involving two generations. The young Amberson prince George's romance with Lucy is dashed due to the potential reunion of their parents once George's father has died. Lucy's father -- newly rich from the automobile manufacturing destroying the social order of the Amberson's status -- attempts to marry George's mother. George comes between them, dashing the chance for both his and his mother's romantic fulfillment.

As this drama plays out, the family inevitable declines in worth as well, hastened by poor investing decisions.  There is a passage in which one Amberson gets caught up in a disastrous investment scheme that eventually destroys their savings which is a perfect rendering of the psychology bubble economics. 

The culminating image is shocking: the once aristocratic George is left as a regular factory worker who on Sundays wanders aimlessly the now unrecognizable, grimy industrial city he once traversed in a horse-and-buggy.   

Perhaps its fortunate that Detroit, not Indianapolis, won out on the auto-manufacturing boom (not a foregone conclusion in 1918) so that we would not experience the full brunt of the decline of that era.