3: "All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

Well, here we are.  Four months, 660 pages and a heaping pile of life altering events later, I have finally finished "All the King's Men."

"All the King's Men" won the Pulitzer and is, according to the back cover, one of the best novels on American politics ever written.  What stood out to me though, was that this novel didn't really feel like it was about politics, at least not the politics we think of today.  I don't remember a political party being mentioned once in the book, though I am sure they were at some point.  The story really focuses on relationships, and the politics of personal relationships across many different facets of life.  The main character, though I hesitate to call him a protagonist, and narrator is a man named Jack Burden.  He is a journalist who gets swept into the inner circle that orbits the personality of the small town politician Willie Stark, who becomes governor of the state of Louisiana.  Willie Stark takes office on the strength of his small town/everyman persona.  He aims to sweep the old guard out of office and put the needs of the common folk first.  The irony being, of course, that Willie is as corrupt and power hungry as any of the old politicians, but he is able to rationalize and justify his behavior because he is doing it all in the name of the working man.  Jack is employed and befriended by Willie, and is used to research and rake up muck on the people Willie desires to have leverage against. It is never clear how much he believes in Willie's message or his own role in Willie's schemes, but he sticks with Willie until the bitter end.  Without giving too much away, Jack loses almost everyone he loves in the process, but the ending does leave a little hope that Jack finds peace.

Warren's writing style is really incredible.  The words flow off the page, and he creates as vivid a mental image as I can remember ever getting while reading.  An example: "out at the University, on the practice field, the toe of some long-legged, slug-footed, box-shouldered lad kept smacking the leather, and farther away scrimmage surged and heaved to the sound of shouts and peremptory whistles."  All Warren is doing is describing a scene where the background includes a football team at practice, and he crafts this wonderfully simple to read, but incredibly deep and rich sentence to describe it.  And the entire novel is like that.  It really is a joy to read.  And, unlike Faulkner, Warren regularly uses punctuation, which is appreciated. 

I enjoyed this book immensely, unfortunately due to my own laziness and the disruptions that life can have, my reading of it was inconsistent and disjointed.  I would have enjoyed it more if I had been able to commit to it regularly.  To me, "All the King's Men" will always remind me of some of the most tumultuous months of my life.  Since I began reading this book in late October of 2010, and in no particular order, I have had one cousin get married, my sister-in-law get engaged, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and Valentine's Day have all come and gone, my grandfather passed away, followed only weeks later by the death of my father, I lost one job and began another, and my football team won the Super Bowl for the first time since 1997, and I travelled to Kyoto, Japan and Hong Kong, China.   And I read "All the King's Men."  If someone had told me all of that would happen when I purchased this book on a beautiful October day in Baltimore, I wouldn't have believed them.  I might have run screaming in the other direction.  Needless to say, life can head in some funny directions sometimes.

On that note, I would like to end with my favorite passage from "All the King's Men."

Warren writes: "After a great blow or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up.  You adjust yourself and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity....I felt that the story was over, that what had been begun a long time back had been played out, that the lemon had been squeezed dry.  But if one thing is certain, it is that no story is ever over, for the story that we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops, it will be called on account of darkness.  But it is a long day."