Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington

Published 1922 · 168 pages · 84,495 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Alice Adams to read?

Alice Adams scores 41 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
Period American prose, accessible and precise.
Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
Controlled sentences with social observation.
Abstraction: 40 out of 100
Class and aspiration explored through Alice's struggles.
Information density: 40 out of 100
Midwestern social world efficiently depicted.
Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
Alice's self-deception creates gaps for readers.
Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
Social climbing, the family carry symbolic weight.
Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
Tarkington's sympathy operates through gentle irony.
Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
Alice's fate decided but future uncertain.
Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
Straightforward narrative following Alice.

How Alice Adams is regarded

Alice Adams holds a literary regard score of 45 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Alice Adams sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (168 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Alice Adams scores 66 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
“Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren't so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never CAN happen to?”
Symbol: Formal
Over the pictures, the vases, the old brown plush rocking-chairs and the stool, over the three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy chair and the gray velure sofa—over everything everywhere, was the familiar coating of smoke grime.
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony phase 4) (irony iv)
“I looked ahead all summer to something I was afraid of, and I said to myself, 'Well, if that happens, I'm finished!' But it wasn't so, papa. It did happen, and nothing's finished; I'm going on, just the same”
Genre: Novel
She had now to practice an art that affords but a limited variety of methods, even to the expert: the art of seeming to have an escort or partner when there is none.

Where the story of Alice Adams takes place

  • Midwestern industrial city, soft-coal smoke, post-WWI, spring to autumn (1919 to 1921), the main setting

6 things that are true of Alice Adams, with the passage for each

  1. The Adams family hang a photograph of the Colosseum over the mantel, which Alice had struggled to install in place of an engraving of the Niagara Suspension Bridge.

    an enormous photograph of the Colosseum.

  2. Alice gathers 300 wild violets in the rain to wear to the Palmers' dance.

    she had three hundred violets.

  3. Walter takes Alice to the ball in a rented flivver belonging to the Lambs' chauffeur.

    It belongs to old J. A. Lamb himself. He keeps it for their coon chauffeur. I rent it from him.

  4. Adams's job at Lamb and Company was in the sundries department, for which he got $1,100 a year when he was first promoted.

    Eleven hundred cool dollars a year ($1,100.00). That's all!

  5. Walter is found short in his accounts at Lamb and Company, which Charley Lohr announces after the dinner.

    he's quite considerable short in his accounts down at Lamb and Company.

  6. J. A. Lamb offers about $9,350 to buy Adams's plant, enough to cover the mortgage and Walter's deficit.

    I could offer him about ninety-three hundred dollars as a total—or say ninety-three hundred and fifty

Scenes in Alice Adams that Frye would name

17 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Alazon, untitled
she found time to wonder why she was building up this fiction for Mr. Arthur Russell. Alice acts the impostor, inventing cigars and a rich father.
Agon, untitled
I just want to tell you, whatever I did feel, I don't feel MEAN any more; not to-day, I don't. There's a meaner man in this world than I am, Mr. Lamb! The confrontation between Adams and Lamb over the sign and the glue is the book's central contest.
Displacement, untitled
Alice had been playing with the mirror's reflections—posturing her arms and her expressions, clasping her hands behind her neck Alice's self-fashioning for an imaginary audience gives a realist surface to a romance-heroine pattern.
Pharmakos, untitled
Wasn't she at her lowest value at least a means of killing time? Evidently the mean beeves thought not. Alice is the excluded girl at the ball, scapegoated by the 'frozen-face' crowd.
Anagnorisis, untitled
For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting movement. Reading her father's love letter, Alice recognizes that her parents had a past of their own.
Anagnorisis, untitled
And then she thought, “But which one is myself?” The mirror scene is a recognition of the false designer within her.

Books that share these scenes with Alice Adams

About the author

Booth Tarkington