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A review by mattdube
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
5.0
This is an amazing book, and when you read it, it's hard not to be, like, totally knocked out. It's a performance, maybe in the way that Rudhdie's MIdhnight's Children or Maggie Nelson's Argonauts is, where there's this barrelling sense that what you're reading is something different than anything you've read before, that it dissolves the boundaries of what books are supposed to do and refashions them into something fresh and new.
In the case of this book, the idea is that Agee and photographer Walker Evans go to rural AL in 1937 or so and embed themselves with a sharecropper family to report on life there. Evans' photos are well-known, and rightly so, but I think Agee's side of the report is less read. Which is understandable-- it's 400pages of prose, and it only rarely gives you the details you want, even when it breaks down what people wore in the morning during the week and what they wore to church on Sunday, or the exact dimensions of their house. Agee spends a lot of time thinking through what he is doing, trying to capture a lifestyle in words, and he's smart and passionate and interesting, and he gets very carried away with himself it it's amazing and sometimes boring and sometimes baffling, but very cool.
One thing that comforted me, sort of, was that Agee, at least here, is not racist and not sexist. He's not perfect, but he does seem to understand the pressure that African-Americans face in the Jim Crow South, and he sets out to ennoble them. This isn't the same as just letting them be who they are, of course, but it's a lot better than the alternative. Likewise, he seems conscious of the straitened circumstances of the women he encounters, though he also seems to see them as objects, one to lust after, quietly, and the others to pity. They never quite step forward with the fullness of Gudger, and maybe this is grading on a curve, but it is so much better and more progressive than I think it could have been.
In the case of this book, the idea is that Agee and photographer Walker Evans go to rural AL in 1937 or so and embed themselves with a sharecropper family to report on life there. Evans' photos are well-known, and rightly so, but I think Agee's side of the report is less read. Which is understandable-- it's 400pages of prose, and it only rarely gives you the details you want, even when it breaks down what people wore in the morning during the week and what they wore to church on Sunday, or the exact dimensions of their house. Agee spends a lot of time thinking through what he is doing, trying to capture a lifestyle in words, and he's smart and passionate and interesting, and he gets very carried away with himself it it's amazing and sometimes boring and sometimes baffling, but very cool.
One thing that comforted me, sort of, was that Agee, at least here, is not racist and not sexist. He's not perfect, but he does seem to understand the pressure that African-Americans face in the Jim Crow South, and he sets out to ennoble them. This isn't the same as just letting them be who they are, of course, but it's a lot better than the alternative. Likewise, he seems conscious of the straitened circumstances of the women he encounters, though he also seems to see them as objects, one to lust after, quietly, and the others to pity. They never quite step forward with the fullness of Gudger, and maybe this is grading on a curve, but it is so much better and more progressive than I think it could have been.