“Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him. He had literally to fight his way free of it. From So Big (of fond and infantile derivation) it had been condensed into Sobig. And Sobig DeJong, in all its consonantal disharmony, he had remained until he was a ten-year-old schoolboy in that incredibly Dutch district southwest of Chicago known first as New Holland and later as High Prairie. At ten, by dint of fists, teeth, copper-toed boots, and temper, he earned the right to be called by his real name, Dirk DeJong. Now and then, of course, the nickname bobbed up and had to be subdued in a brief and bitter skirmish. His mother, with whom the name had originated, was the worst offender. When she lapsed he did not, naturally, use schoolyard tactics on her. But he sulked and glowered portentously and refused to answer, though her tone, when she called him So Big, would have melted the heart of any but that natural savage, a boy of ten.
The nickname had sprung from the early and idiotic question invariably put to babies and answered by them, with infinite patience, through the years of their infancy.”
This Edna Ferber novel won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize, early in the prize. In a lot of ways, it’s a kind of Willa Cather type novel about a woman from the city moving out to the countryside, falling in love with her life there, and deciding this is the new life for her. The results of this is more mixed than that, this being a kind of naturalistic novel, because after she gets married, she realizes that this choices has, maybe limited, or at least shaped her future in some ways. Because she’s, not exactly bohemian, but wordly, she has to adapt to what being the wife of a farmer means, and what it means is a more physical life. This ends up being good for her, but when her husband dies, and she’s left with her young son, the realities of farm life continue to press on her. Luckily she planted a long-term, but fancy crop (it’s asparagus, but it’s treated like the height of folly) and she makes a connection that offers her a market for this, she’s able to right her ship and look to the future. The novel is called So Big because this is a nickname for her son, and his presence in her life becomes the driving force for her and for the latter part of the novel. We shift to him, who with the benefit of his mother’s hard work has the leisure to decide what he wants to do with himself. He begins in architecture, but when he gets a taste for money, he switches to bonds (it’s 1925 and all), and this dismays his mother because its so mindless and boring. She had hoped he might stick with the artfulness of architecture. Alas.
The novel is compelling and perfectly well-written, if a little artless, but it’s a good representation of popular fiction of about 100 years ago.
