Lessons from Alice Adams

Alice Adams is the daughter who has to make the house look like more than it is. She borrows, dyes, and invents. She walks downtown with a stick she hopes will read as fashion, and she treats every nod as a grade. Mrs. Adams pushes the family toward a life the salary cannot cover, and she has a plan for it: a glue process Virgil worked out on Lamb's payroll twenty-five years ago. Walter works at Lamb's, runs with a rougher crowd, and later needs three hundred and fifty dollars he will not explain. Mildred Palmer calls Alice a friend and never mentions the cousin everyone expects her to marry. Arthur Russell, that cousin, dances with Alice out of kindness and then keeps walking her home. J. A. Lamb, the old employer, will close the book with a price, not a sermon.

At the Palmer dance Alice's tin-foil violets fail next to Mildred's florist bouquet, and the rented Ford has to be left at the kerb so the porte-cochere will not tell on them. She saves a chair, taps her foot, and plays the girl whose partner has only stepped away. Walter is found shooting dice in the cloak-room. A week later Russell walks her home, and she invents cigars for her sick father and turns the dice into research. Then Virgil gives in. He mortgages the house, resigns from Lamb's by letter, and opens a glue works whose smell fills the street. At lunch with the Palmers, Russell hears the club version: old Lamb trusted a clerk, and the clerk walked off with the secret. Mrs. Palmer calls Alice a pushing sort of girl, and he says nothing. Then Mrs. Adams stages a dinner they cannot afford: hired help, roses, caviar, Brussels sprouts, and a heat wave that wilts the room before the food is served. Russell will not meet Alice's eyes. She tells him he is never coming back and hands him the hat he forgot. That night an old friend brings word that Walter is short in his accounts at Lamb's.

Tarkington published Alice Adams in 1921 and won the Pulitzer for it in 1922, his second. He lets the romance carry the reader's hope, then moves the weight somewhere else. Alice is not a villain and not a joke. She has learned that class is a costume, and she wears it until the heat, the hired maid, and the silent guest make it impossible. The money plot belongs to her parents, and so does the debt. Lamb answers the glue works with a sign across the street, then buys the little plant for enough to clear the mortgage and Walter's deficit. The house fills with boarders. Nobody rescues Alice, and nobody punishes her. She still has to choose the stairs rather than another walk downtown in borrowed flowers.

The pressure starts when pretending becomes believing: Alice's invented calendar and richer house harden into a story she half believes, until the dinner leaves nothing to hide behind. The work of social climbing is what keeps that story standing, and the novel counts it out in three hundred violets picked by hand, a Ford left at the kerb, and a saved chair at the Palmer dance. Class anxiety in a small town sets the price, because the walking stick and Henrietta Lamb's guest list grade a girl by her address before she speaks. Family shapes and traps that ambition when Mrs. Adams pushes a sick man out of Lamb and Company, then spends the house on a dinner meant to catch Arthur Russell. Recovering after public humiliation begins on the porch, when Alice says goodbye first and walks back into the rooms that staged the collapse. Choosing work over the fantasy is Frincke's stairs in a plain dark suit, an ending that looks like a comedown only until she stops asking the town to believe a story.

The book opens on a sick man arguing about an open window and ends with his daughter climbing towards one. Wide Reads follows all twenty-five chapters in between with summaries, quotes, and audio, from the violets in Belleview Park to the sunshine on Frincke's top steps.