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  • The Prose Elegy: An Exploration of Modern American and British Fiction by John B. Vickery
  • Mary Power (bio)
The Prose Elegy: An Exploration of Modern American and British Fiction, by John B. Vickery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. xvii + 191 pp. $32.00.

The Prose Elegy is a problematic book, particularly in regard to Joyce’s work. It was preceded by John B. Vickery’s The Modern Elegiac Temper,1 which argued that modern poetic elegies must address a broader sensibility toward a variety of losses than earlier ones that dealt mainly with an individual’s death and the triad of lamentation, confrontation, and consolation. Although there is little discussion of W. H. Auden and less of W. B. Yeats in Modern Elegiac Temper, it provides a perceptive treatment of elegies by Ezra Pound, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Allen Tate, Edith Sitwell, and Louis MacNeice, among others. Vickery’s primary concerns in The Prose Elegy are family and love, followed by cultural and philosophical issues. The book is meant as a companion volume and is formatted in the same manner as his previous work. Narrative prose is very different from lyric poetry, however, and its text cannot sustain the focus, concentration, heightened language, and style of lyric poetry for very long due to its length, bulk, and mission of telling an extended story.

Vickery puts his best foot forward when starting with James Agee’s A Death in the Family and John Updike’s The Centaur.2 Both involve child narrators who, over time, come to terms with the loss of their fathers and provide the writer with a clean and uninterrupted canvas on which to focus. The elegiac treatment cannot be sustained with Virginia Woolf’s The Years,3 though, which comes next. Vickery feels that concentration on individual character is lost here, and the reader should look at the family as a “group entity” (42). He does not view Eleanor Pargiter as the main character holding the narration together, nor does he see Woolf’s novel as a family saga, a durable and commendable genre, rather than an elegy. These missteps skew the interpretation of Woolf’s work; characters die, and generations succeed each other in the novel, but this is the extent to which it could be considered an elegy.

Vickery turns to Joyce and Dubliners to show what he calls [End Page 744] “Familial Disintegration,” the title of chapter 4. Whatever happened to “scrupulous meanness” and the concept of the epiphany? The author overlooks the obvious possibility of comparing death and mortality in the first and last stories—“The Sisters” and “The Dead”—and instead enlists the fourth one, “Eveline,” and says of the main character, “the only elegy she could mount was the denial of freedom, life, and personal choice” (59). He adds that Joyce’s tale “mutely testifies to a woman having forgone the possibility of a family life for herself” (59) and concludes that Joyce writes an elegy for Eveline because she cannot do it herself. Vickery argues this despite the ambiguous ending with which Joyce leaves the reader: perhaps Eveline will overcome her pain in time, meet a nice neighborhood fellow, or simply enjoy her own independence. Despite such possibilities, Vickery’s discussion of the story is too limited. Most readers question Frank’s character, but Vickery omits such an examination because his arguments rooted in elegy do not allow for it. He admits that Joyce maintained “careful insistence on the order of the stories” (60) but does not mention that “Eveline” is the fourth one in a collection of fifteen and the first about a young adult. He also does not refer to recent Joyce criticism, instead imposing his own interpretation of Joyce’s ordering of the book’s contents by closely reading the text; a discussion of Katherine Mullins’s essay on Buenos Aires and the white slave trade would dramatically improve Vickery’s examination of not only “Eveline,” but of Dubliners in general.4 Vickery offers passing remarks on the underlying theme of the disintegration of the family in “Two Gallants” and “Counterparts,” and he maintains that perspective as the over-riding theme in the...

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