The Captive Reader

Having now read Emily of Deep Valley by Maud Hart Lovelace, I can understand why it is such a beloved comfort read for many.  It is a story simply told and full of heart, a nostalgic, wholesome tale of an intelligent young woman’s struggles to build a rich, engaging life.  Emily Webster is one of the cleverest young women in Deep Valley but after graduation, when all her friends are heading off to university, Emily chooses to stay behind to care for the grandfather who has raised her since her parents’ death.  Without her childhood friends or the high school classes that brought her so much joy, Emily struggles.  She finds herself feeling isolated and depressed and, in the manner of all good children’s heroines, resolves to do something about that, to “muster her wits” as she calls it and create an exciting, enriching life.

The portion of the novel dealing with Emily’s difficulty in finding her place in Deep Valley as an adult, not a child, is fascinating.  A good section of the book is devoted to this and to her ensuing depression, happily for the reader if not Emily since this forms the most compelling, original portion of the novel.  Emily is conscious that she needs to change to stop her depression from worsening, but, for a long time, she struggles.  Lovelace has a rather perfect description of her feelings at this time that feels very true to the kind of oppression one feels when faced with depression, knowing that something needs to be done but not knowing how to do it:

‘A mood like this has to be fought.  It’s like an enemy with a gun,’ she told herself.  But she couldn’t seem to find a gun with which to fight.

Emily is a character any life-long reader can easily identify with.  She is intelligent and excited to learn but longs for other people who share her enthusiasm.  She was never the most popular girl in school, but she had friends and her debate team members, people who respected and admired her.  She was part of the school community and adored it.  Now, with all her friends gone, she is left with her grandfather and her books.  But even books aren’t enough: she doesn’t just want to read mindlessly but to debate ideas with others:

She did bring home books from the library, in armloads, replenishing them every two or three days.  She read avidly, indiscriminately, using them as an antidote for the pain in her heart.  But they didn’t help much.  There was no one to talk them over with.  They were almost as useless as the newspapers.

Cheerfully, though perhaps a touch unrealistically, it doesn’t take long for Emily to ‘muster her wits’.  Even before Thanksgiving, having spent on a few months without her high school friends, she has enacted a course of self-improvement and socialisation.  She starts a reading group with local women, returns to the piano lessons she had loved before school commitments forced her to abandon them, begins learning to dance, and befriends both a slightly older group of local young people and the Deep Valley Syrian community.  She still longs for more education and the friends who are away but as she becomes more and more absorbed in the work she has set for herself, she develops a busy, rewarding life that she is fully engaged in.

Emily’s relationship with the Syrian community is quite interesting and the novel’s most unique feature.  Having become intrigued by sociology and the ideal of social work while she was in high school, Emily is remarkably free of prejudices and it doesn’t take long for her to befriend a number of Syrian families and hatch plans to improve their lot.  Her first friends are a pair of young boys, Kalil and Yusef.  Cheerful, eager and polite, they become welcome visitors at her house, bringing joy to both Emily and her grandfather.  Yet the local boys tease and bully them.  Emily begins her efforts by bringing Kalil and Yusef together with a pair of American boys, forming a boys’ club that helps bridge the cultural divide.  After visiting Kalil and Yusef’s homes and seeing how little English the mothers’ in the community speak, living more isolated lives than their children and husbands, she also begins giving language classes. And she joins others in the Deep Valley community to advocate for adult education classes for the Syrians to help them adapt to their lives in America.  In doing so, she becomes close to Jed Wakeman, a young, new teacher at the high school.

Oh, Jed.  What to say?  The book’s illustrations of him as a slimmed-hipped, bowtie-wearing, bright-eyed all-American did not help at all.  He looked very good and very perfect but completely uninteresting, which is pretty much how he comes across in the text.  Their idyllic courtship is very reasonable, very logical and very boring.  Jed is too perfect, Emily’s mirror image rather than foil – they agree on everything.  He’s blandly inoffensive and serves mostly to support Emily’s growing confidence.  These aren’t bad things but I never got a sense of Jed as a person, just as a platform of ideas that match Emily’s.  Seemingly every time he appears, he’s introduced with some sort of reference to his stature (he’s large.  We get it) rather than anything related to his character.  He never develops enough to feel like a real person.  But, then again, Emily, though relatable, is pretty bland herself so there is a certain logic to their pairing.

Lovelace has an irritating inclination to drift into sickening nostalgic and/or patriotic passages that would have completely destroyed this book for me when I was younger and less tolerant than I am now.  The story was written in 1950 but set in 1912 and full of oh-so-conscious and unnecessarily detailed allusions to the fashions of the day.  I like hearing about a crisp shirtwaist or stylish sailor suit as much as the next girl, but there is a limit and it was quickly reached.  I suppose there is an audience who appreciates the unabashed flag-waving but, aside from pointing out Deep Valley’s fervent patriotism, it served no purpose.  It was generally not gracefully incorporated into the story and felt clunky and intrusive.

I don’t think I could face the Besty-Tacy books that Lovelace is famous for (the glimpse of Betsy here was more than enough for me) but I did quite enjoy this.  It’s not high-quality children’s literature but it is a very light, entertaining, wholesome story with fascinating central issues, Lovelace’s intelligent treatment of which should be enough to keep any adult reader engaged.  If the characters had been more complex and realistic, I’m sure I would have come away raving about it.  As is, it’s a book I’m now glad to say I own and which I’ll be happy to return to when I’m looking for an undemanding but thoughtful read.