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nmanclsaxon's review
4.0
After some reflection, I realized that I initially judged this play too harshly, and changed my rating from 3 to 4 stars.
Reading a play 90 years after its premiere can create some issues when it comes to interpretation; what may have seemed like obvious satire back then can read like blatant ignorance years later. This is the problem I was running into: discerning social commentary from storytelling.
Tobacco Road is set in the rural, deep south in the 1930s. Many of the social practices then (ie. marrying off children to grown men, domestic abuse, casual racism, etc.) are morally reprehensible to the reader in 2023. However, I realized that it was precisely these offenses that kept me engaged and made this book a page-turner.
The Lester family is a bunch of conniving, hypocritical, stubbornly ignorant characters. Their flaws may very well be because of their extreme poverty, but it becomes difficult to empathize with them when you see the lengths these characters will go to to maintain the life they know. Thus the question becomes: is Tobacco Road a critique of Southern social practices, or an exploration of the effect of poverty on a working class family? Likely, the answer is some combination of the two.
I’ve said it in reviews before and I’ll say it again: the mark of a well-written story is that the ending is the logical conclusion of the beginning. Tobacco Road is an exemplary model of this fact.
Reading a play 90 years after its premiere can create some issues when it comes to interpretation; what may have seemed like obvious satire back then can read like blatant ignorance years later. This is the problem I was running into: discerning social commentary from storytelling.
Tobacco Road is set in the rural, deep south in the 1930s. Many of the social practices then (ie. marrying off children to grown men, domestic abuse, casual racism, etc.) are morally reprehensible to the reader in 2023. However, I realized that it was precisely these offenses that kept me engaged and made this book a page-turner.
The Lester family is a bunch of conniving, hypocritical, stubbornly ignorant characters. Their flaws may very well be because of their extreme poverty, but it becomes difficult to empathize with them when you see the lengths these characters will go to to maintain the life they know. Thus the question becomes: is Tobacco Road a critique of Southern social practices, or an exploration of the effect of poverty on a working class family? Likely, the answer is some combination of the two.
I’ve said it in reviews before and I’ll say it again: the mark of a well-written story is that the ending is the logical conclusion of the beginning. Tobacco Road is an exemplary model of this fact.
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