A Death in the Family by James Agee

It sounds depressing, and it is, but it is also quite beautiful. Agee illustrates a young family’s noble struggle to comprehend the loss of their husband and father and move on. Jay crashes his automobile on his way home late one night, and he is killed instantly. His death devastates all his relations - that a young father, who worked out of his native rural poverty to attain a respected place in the middle class, who had recently conquered his alcoholism and reconciled himself to his wife, who had two tiny children to raise - that he should be alive one moment and gone forever the next, overwhelms them.

Agee's voice, as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is subdued but arresting. He writes in a mesmerizing cadence of prose, an unparalleled lilting song; his works are a melancholy ode to humanity. He describes his characters and their world in furious detail, invoking all the senses and imbuing the novel with a shocking degree of authenticity. His portrayals of sounds ring in the ears with unsurpassed verisimilitude. His is a severe but thoroughly accurate realism.

The intensely realistic nature of the book is due, no doubt, to its autobiographical origins. Agee's own father died in the same manner as Jay when Agee was six; Jay's six-year-old son Rufus bears Agee's middle name. Rufus' bewilderment and anguish in the wake of the events form some of the most poignant elements in the book; Agee's careful delineation of a young boy's thoughts surely bespeaks his own recollections.

The book must have functioned, therefore, as a tribute to his father. For Agee's work transcends reality, assuming a sort of symbolically charged air. Under his pen real life becomes loftier, more poetic, more important, drenched in deep emotion; fervently grounded in practical matters but simultaneously reaching for ethereal heights. He permits some of his characters a belief in the supernatural, and is on the whole sympathetic towards them, allowing them to cry out to God with the utmost sincerity. Spirituality pervades his work.

The novel inevitably leads one to ponder mortality, as all deaths do. In a society in which accidental deaths are increasingly rarer, and life spans are continually lengthening, these times of reflection are not as prevalent. Agee's book, then, in its ferocious veracity and breathless immediacy, functions as that reminder, urging self-evaluation on the reader: What would I do if someone close to me died? Am I ready to die?

Agee himself died rather young, at 45, of a heart attack. He never saw his book published and so did not enjoy the acclaim of the entirely deserved Pulitzer Prize that it would bring him.