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Originally Posted by issybird
My biggest issue with the book was the structure. In the end, I felt that the story happened in those 15 years that Cather skipped over, that transformed the bleak and barren prairie dotted with soddies into the fecund landscape all around, with the concomittant triumphs and disasters that caused the characters to turn out as they did. Instead, Alexandra wonderful and never put a foot wrong, apparently (I'll get back to that), brothers horrible and avaricious, hey, presto prosperity! And lacking the plot she didn't pursue, Cather cobbled on the melodramatic story of Emil and Marie because she needed a device to wrap it up, including bringing Carl back, he who also experienced offscreen prosperity, by prospecting in his case
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The lack of structure is a primary criticism of this book. I also wished we knew more about what happened in those missing years. I was surprised when the story skipped so much time. I really liked this review by A.S. Byatt.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/200...iction.asbyatt
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Her own statements about her work are both terse and illuminating. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), is a good novel about an engineer who builds a bridge which collapses. Her second, O Pioneers! (1913) was, she claimed, the one where she had found her own way of telling - with "no arranging or inventing; everything was spontaneous and took its own place right or wrong ... Since I wrote this book for myself I ignored all the situations and accents that were then generally thought to be necessary." What she means by "situations and accents" is both dramatic tension and the scenes of confrontation or discovery towards which most novels move. O Pioneers! is a long, slow-paced series of visions or tableaux of the lives of the Swedish farmers on the Great Plains. It tells of planting and harvest, passionate love and murder, in the same inevitable, calm tone. Cather's friend ES Sergeant records that she complained to Cather that the only flaw in the book was that it had no sharp skeleton, and elicited the reply:
"... true enough, I had named a weakness. But the land has no sculptured lines or features. The soil is soft, light, fluent, black, for the grass of the plains creates this type of soil as it decays. This influences the mind and memory of the author and so the composition of the story."
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I think part of the problem is also that the book was conceived as two different short stories, one about Alexandra and another about Emil & Marie that she then combined into a novel.