We ride again! It’s been a long hiatus, people, but you would take some time off too if you were slogging through 1930s Pulitzer novels. Especially if some were hard-to-find and slightly stinky once they got there (my copy of Lamb in His Bosom was particularly bedraggled, being held together mostly with mouldering yellow tape, but I digress)… for your reading pleasure, a summary!
It would be easier to present you with a scan of the crazy-complicated family tree I drew to keep track of all the progeny in Lamb in His Bosom than to describe the actual plot of this novel, which has more “begats” in it than the Old Testament. Cean Carver is the protagonist and progenitor of this tree with many branches, trying to eke out a life in backwoods Georgia with her husband Lonzo Smith and their ever-expanding brood.
The bulk of the plot revolves around the toil inherent in homesteading and childbirth, in which Cean reluctantly gives birth to somewhere around twelve children. Honestly, I lost count at one point–easy to do, since some of the children are unnamed and die at birth. Every event of Cean’s life seems riddled with tragedy and bad luck, from her mother being crippled by spilt boiling sugar on the eve of her first birth, to the panther she kills moments after her third birth, to the illicit antics of her ne’er-do-well brother Lias. There’s even a dog with rabies to be put down… Lamb is just that kind of cheerful read, people.
More stuff happens: There’s a large subplot about Cean’s brother Lias being a scoundrel who leaves his wife Margot to father a child with flirty Bliss Corwin, take up with fancy Coast women as lovers, and then run away to look for gold in California. When Lonzo cuts his foot open with an ax, the wound turns gangrenous and kills him, widowing Cean. Cean’s other brother Jasper marries Margot when Lias is declared dead after eight years of silence. Dermid O’Connor, an itinerant preacher, sets up a school in town and then the Sweetwater Church of the New Light and woos Cean. Cean’s eldest daughter Maggie dies in childbirth. Just about every man in the book goes off to fight in the Civil War and just about every woman and child moves in with Cean for the duration. Lias torments everyone from beyond the grave by sending a letter for Margot to expect his arrival, even though he knows he’s on death’s door and will never make it home to see her again. Some of the
men make it home from war, some are maimed, some are crazed, and others never make it back.
All in all, the novel is episodic, stretching back to discuss Cean’s parents and forward to follow her children and grandchildren. Throughout, though, the struggle and difficulty of life at the time and surprisingly contemporary insights into the condition of pregnancy and young motherhood are the through-lines that draw the novel together.
