Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) by Alan Gurganus

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989)

by Alan Gurganus

Fells, North Carolina

North Carolina: 9/20

    This book is 700 pages long.  It isn't JUST 700 pages long- it is also a big ole physical 700 page book with smallish type and small margins.  Of course, I'd heard about this book before- Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All  was a monster hit when it was first published- especially for a 700 page work of more or less serious literary fiction.  It spawned a 1994 television mini-series which was also a hit, winning four Emmy's, and a musical version in 2003 (starring Ellen Burstyn) which flopped on Broadway and closed after one show(!).  Its length precludes a ready transition to the internet era, but I'd wager most active readers over the age of forty have at least heard of it.  

   For those unfamiliar, Oldest Living Confederate Widor Tells All is both the title of the book and an accurate description of the plot- a ninety nine year old Lucy Marsden, married to a 50-something confederate veteran at the age of fifteen, lives in a rest home and she is being interviewed by someone- there are frequent in-book references to the tape recording process of the interview.   Over the course of these 700 pages you not only get to hear Lucy's story- child bride, mother-of-eight and put-upon wife- but also the stories of her husband, her mother, her husbands mother, her husband's ex-slave and possibly the narrator's only friend and maybe more that I'm leaving out.  The multiplicity of narrative viewpoints and the use of a spoken idiom both conspire to lengthen Confederate Widow.  

  Lucy is a plucky, humorous narrator, and one aspect I couldn't get over is that her aw shucks, almost exaggerated southern dialect (which, mind you, constitutes almost the only distinct narrative voice for 700 pages) is something that young Lucy adopts to annoy her Mother, who raises her to be better.  Lucy has other plans, those other plans being married off to a fifty year old man before she turns 16.  

   The over-all vibe for me resembled that of John Irving- quirky, eccentric small-town types who experience both humor and great sadness- but in a humorous way.  In fact, if I had to make a one-line pitch for this book pre-publication it would be "John Irving but set in North Carolina"- Irving was at the height of his powers in 1989- that was the year A Prayer for Owen Meany came out. Also, in 1989, Alice Walker published The Temple of My Familiar and Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow) came out so Guraganus was right there and you could argue that this book would be a better representative in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list than is A Prayer for Owen Meany- one of several Irving novels on that list,

  There is no doubt it's one of the top books from North Carolina and a top 5 title for the sub-chapter (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) and top 10 for the full chapter.  Still, it is hard to imagine many people taking the time to actually sit down and read this 700 page book in 2024.  The late 1980s were different in that regard- you could publish a 470 page novel like London Fields by Martin Amis and EVERYONE read it.