Finished: All The King's Men (Warren) Wow, a book I never in a million years thought would suck me in...being about a political icon from Lousiana...but it sure did. In fact, even though it's a Pulitzer Prize winning book, and in the top 100 of every single darn book list I had dug up, it was one of those books I had just decided I wasn't going to force myself to read. I'm so so glad I changed my mind. :-) This book was about so much more than "Luzianna" politics and Willie Stark, i.e. the thinly masked character based on the 1930's governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. This book was first, for me, whose father was a Northern Louisiana boy, about being enveloped by the whole feel of that state...or of that part of the state. I can't even describe it, but I could feel it...just remembering the long drives we would make from Texas up through the piney woods of Louisiana to see my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. Honestly, I read the entire book with the Louisiana accent completely embedded in my head, lol. Secondly, the book was more about life lessons, right and wrong, how a great man could be a scoundrel, but how it could all come from his heart, deep down, being in the right place, but his human nature being one of never taking no for an answer...no matter what the cost...and no matter who he had to bribe. I've never read a thing about Huey Long until two days ago when I read a bio to see who exactly I was reading about in this book. It seems as if he was loved by many and hated by many, but by gum, he certainly made a difference in Louisiana. In All The King's Men, Willie Stark makes his imprint on the poor people of the state as well, and on the other politicians too. He comes from humble and even naive beginnings. It is when he is actually used by the shady incumbent governor of the state...encouraged to run against him, that he actually gets a whole lot of reality thrown his way. He thinks he's loved and being encouraged because they think he can do good...when in reality, the incumbent governor just wants him to run so the people who are ready for a change, will split the vote between Willie Stark and the other guy running against the incumbent, thereby assuring the incumbent of a win. That is the turning point for Willie Start...when he realizes that he's got to turn to granite to make it in that world of politics. Third, the book is actually more about Willie Stark's right hand man, former reporter turned governor's confidant and do-everything man, Jack Burden. Jack is the narrator of the story and this book is actually more about Jack and his realizations, his growing up, and his self-evolving than Willie's. Jack is one of the few people who Willie trusts implicitly, and he's one of the few people who will tell Willie exactly how it is. We have some wonderful flashbacks into Jack's life growing up on the coast of Louisiana next to his childhood friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, who both play prominently in the story later down the line. And, we've got some great characters in the story who are so vividly described and meticulously written, that you feel as if you can look up and see them walking down that small-town Louisiana street...right up to the courthouse in the square in the middle of the town where the four busy streets surround it. Amazing the imagery of the book. Yes, Robert Penn Warren is very long-winded...over 600 pages worth, but I savored every word of it. Anyway, there are characters like Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Judge Irwin, Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy O'Sheean, and on and on. I'm not saying I'm in love with this book. It will take me awhile to digest it and figure out if it belongs in my favorites...but it is definitely a book that belongs on the top 100 list. There's massive heartbreak, there's humor, there's intensity, there's reminiscing, there's love, deep love, and there's hate, there's passion. I love many of the passages, so I will include a few below. I also had no idea that Robert Penn Warren was a three time Pulitzer Prize winner (two for poetry) until I read his bio.

When Willie and Jack go to Chicago on business, they are shown the town by a man named Josh Conklin. The little gem about "the real thing" is the kind of writing Penn did all over the book...little things you might not have thought of before, and he puts them into words:

Up there a fellow named Josh Conklin did us the town, and he was the man to do it, a big, burly fellow, with prematurely white hair and a red face and black, beetling eyebrows and a dress suit that fitted him like a corset and a trick apartment like a movie set and an address book an inch thick. He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it, which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time being just one cut more real than the real thing, with money no object.

This passage is from when Jack Burden's childhood mentor and father-figure, Judge Irwin, has declared that he will back Willie Stark's opponent in the upcoming election. Willie "the Boss" had counted on his support. He wants Jack to find something out in the upstanding, honorable, squeaky clean Judge's past that he can use to "convince" him to come back over to his side. I just love Willie's way with words:

    It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be), "There is always something."
    And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."
    And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something." 

And, of course, Willie was right, and there was something...something that sent shock waves and repercussions reverberating through the rest of the book...affecting, in particular, Jack, Anne, Adam, Jack's mother, and Judge Irwin himself. And, when Jack finds out later in the book that his childhood sweetheart and love of his life, Anne, is actually having an affair with Willie, he just can't handle that and hops in his car and drives west all the way out to California for a few days:

I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. It was just where I went.

And, on his trip West, Jack relives in his mind his childhood with Anne and Adam and we see that instant when Adam's kid sister, who always tagged along with them wherever they went, ended up becoming the girl who stole Jack's heart. It is several pages long, but there was just one little snippet of passage I really loved. It was so vivid I could see every emotion:

And little girls sit on hassocks and lean their cheeks pensively against the dear father's knee while his hand toys with the silken locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton. And little girls are fraidy-cats and try the surf with one toe that first day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and splashes their thighs with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton. Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they roast wieners over the campfire and you---for you are a big boy and don't get soot on your nose---point your finger and sing, "Dirty-Face, Dirty-Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!" And then one day when you sing it, the little girl doesn't say a thing back the way she always had, but turns her big eyes on  you, out of the thin little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think she might cry even though she is too big for that now, and as the eyes keep fixed on you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was Anne Stanton. 

Oh my, I just loved that description. :-) So....yes, I would say I'm so very glad that I read this book which I avoided for so long!