book review in the Los Angeles Times
‘A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text’ edited by Michael A. Lofaro
Did James Agee’s editor know what he was doing? Apparently not, as a new version of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is given a makeover.
By Nina Revoy
A Death in the Family:
A Restoration of the Author’s Text
James Agee, edited by Michael A. Lofaro
University of Tennessee Press: 582 pp., $49.95
AT the time of his death of a heart attack at 45, James Agee had published relatively little of his own creative work. Known more for his insightful movie reviews and film adaptations, Agee had produced a novella, a volume of poetry and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a study of Alabama sharecroppers. He left behind the manuscript of a novel he’d been working on for more than a decade, which editor David McDowell published as “A Death in the Family.”
Appearing in 1957 — two years after Agee died — “A Death in the Family” received great acclaim and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
A lyrical, perfectly calibrated and deeply moving account of a man’s death and its effects on his family, it still stands — more than 50 years after its publication — as one of the most beautiful of American novels.
Now, editor Michael A. Lofaro has incorporated recently recovered material and rearranged existing chapters in “A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text.” Much of this material became available to scholars in 2002, after a change in the directorship of the James Agee Trust. Motivated by McDowell’s claim in the original introduction that Agee’s novel was “presented . . . exactly as he wrote it,” Lofaro sets out to correct the “degradation” of Agee’s original manuscript from McDowell’s “editorial decisions, inaccuracy, and deception.” He includes more than 10 additional chapters, replaces substitute versions of three additional chapters and reinserts scenes that appeared as flashbacks in McDowell’s version into the beginning of the story. Lofaro also removes the famous prologue “Knoxville: Summer, 1915” — a previously published set piece that McDowell acknowledges he added to the manuscript — and replaces it with a new introduction, a nightmare sequence. The result is a longer and drastically different book.
Reconstructing Agee’s novel is a questionable undertaking, not least because the existing novel is a masterpiece.