Book Review: Jo’s Boys
Aug. 6th, 2022 01:03 pmIt is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.
By the time she wrote the third March family novel, Jo’s Boys Louisa May Alcott was absolutely, incredibly, 100% done with Plumfield and indeed the entire March family, as evidenced by the above quote. I strongly suspect this a redaction from a first draft in which an earthquake did swallow Plumfield, changed only when her editor begged her on bended knees not to slaughter her whole cast in the final chapter. “Think of the money,” he sobbed, tears in his eyes.
I can only assume Alcott wrote this whole book with her eyes on the money, because she has even less fucks to give than she did in Little Men, and she was already running short of fucks then. There is a certain perfunctory quality to most of it: she has to settle all these boys in professions AND hitch them up with brides and by god she’ll do it, but for the most part she’s bored. She throws in a shipwreck and a murder to try to cheer herself along but even that can’t save it for her.
Actually the best chapter is the one about Jo’s life as a celebrated authoress. At long last she has fulfilled her childhood dream of being a rich and famous writer - and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be! She’s inundated with fan letters and requests for autographs; the doorbell rings incessantly with visitors wanting to meet the literary lioness. Sometimes she climbs out the back window to escape; other times, she pretends to be her own maid, hoping that if they think she’s out they’ll move along. (Unfortunately, that party sees through the imposture, but they leave swiftly anyway, for the young girl fan is desperately disappointed in Jo’s appearance: “'I thought she'd be about sixteen and have her hair braided in two tails down her back,” she mourns.)
In general, Jo can’t stand her young girl fans: “The last time I let in a party of girls one fell into my arms and said, “Darling, love me!”,” she complains. (Apparently fans have just always been Like This.) There’s such an irony that Alcott, who wanted so much to write for boys, has come to be seen so wholly (much more so than in her own lifetime) as a writer for young girls.
In some ways Jo’s Boys is the book that certain critics want Little Women to be: Jo finally achieves incredible literary success, the book forthrightly moralizes in favor of women’s rights and votes for women (there’s a whole chapter where Nan catechizes the young men of her acquaintance on the subject), and Nan herself becomes the spinster career woman many critics yearn for Jo to be - albeit a doctor rather than a writer.
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littlerhymes and I were quite sad that the book offers no convenient girl to ship with Nan. It also does its level best to sink the good ship Nat/Dan: they get exactly one walk together, Nat cuts out early to spend the rest of the evening with his lady love, and then they don’t see each other nor, apparently, think about each other again for the entire book. I could get around the physical separation if they at least pined.)
But at the end of the day, one doesn’t just want a book to move through a checklist of desideratum; one also wants it to be compelling, which Little Women does apparently effortlessly and Jo’s Boys manages mostly when Alcott is writing about how annoying Little Women fans are. For all that she wanted to write about boys, she never seems as interested in most of them as she was in the March sisters.
By the time she wrote the third March family novel, Jo’s Boys Louisa May Alcott was absolutely, incredibly, 100% done with Plumfield and indeed the entire March family, as evidenced by the above quote. I strongly suspect this a redaction from a first draft in which an earthquake did swallow Plumfield, changed only when her editor begged her on bended knees not to slaughter her whole cast in the final chapter. “Think of the money,” he sobbed, tears in his eyes.
I can only assume Alcott wrote this whole book with her eyes on the money, because she has even less fucks to give than she did in Little Men, and she was already running short of fucks then. There is a certain perfunctory quality to most of it: she has to settle all these boys in professions AND hitch them up with brides and by god she’ll do it, but for the most part she’s bored. She throws in a shipwreck and a murder to try to cheer herself along but even that can’t save it for her.
Actually the best chapter is the one about Jo’s life as a celebrated authoress. At long last she has fulfilled her childhood dream of being a rich and famous writer - and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be! She’s inundated with fan letters and requests for autographs; the doorbell rings incessantly with visitors wanting to meet the literary lioness. Sometimes she climbs out the back window to escape; other times, she pretends to be her own maid, hoping that if they think she’s out they’ll move along. (Unfortunately, that party sees through the imposture, but they leave swiftly anyway, for the young girl fan is desperately disappointed in Jo’s appearance: “'I thought she'd be about sixteen and have her hair braided in two tails down her back,” she mourns.)
In general, Jo can’t stand her young girl fans: “The last time I let in a party of girls one fell into my arms and said, “Darling, love me!”,” she complains. (Apparently fans have just always been Like This.) There’s such an irony that Alcott, who wanted so much to write for boys, has come to be seen so wholly (much more so than in her own lifetime) as a writer for young girls.
In some ways Jo’s Boys is the book that certain critics want Little Women to be: Jo finally achieves incredible literary success, the book forthrightly moralizes in favor of women’s rights and votes for women (there’s a whole chapter where Nan catechizes the young men of her acquaintance on the subject), and Nan herself becomes the spinster career woman many critics yearn for Jo to be - albeit a doctor rather than a writer.
(
littlerhymes and I were quite sad that the book offers no convenient girl to ship with Nan. It also does its level best to sink the good ship Nat/Dan: they get exactly one walk together, Nat cuts out early to spend the rest of the evening with his lady love, and then they don’t see each other nor, apparently, think about each other again for the entire book. I could get around the physical separation if they at least pined.) But at the end of the day, one doesn’t just want a book to move through a checklist of desideratum; one also wants it to be compelling, which Little Women does apparently effortlessly and Jo’s Boys manages mostly when Alcott is writing about how annoying Little Women fans are. For all that she wanted to write about boys, she never seems as interested in most of them as she was in the March sisters.
