Book Reviews & Giveaway: Being Polite to Hitler

Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel
Author: Robb Forman Dew

Robb Forman Dew infuses her Southern characters with repartee reminiscent of Peter Taylor, whom he includes in her cast of characters in “Being Polite to Hitler.” Dew and Taylor capture the familial enmeshment and particular joys and tribulations of the Southern upper echelon in a manner that both tantalizes and captivates us. Virginia Wolff’s Mrs. Dalloway with her stream of consciousness, Jane Austen’s emotional morality, as well as Henry James view of the outer world influencing the inner world of characters – it’s all there, wound into a tight ball, with Dew’s own genius transcending his voice. It is no surprise that Dew’s prior novel, “Dale Loves Sophie to Death” won the National Book Award. ‘Being Polite to Hitler” might be her second to win that same award.

Post WW II Washburn, Ohio is in the midst of a drought. Against a heat that disparages her very soul, Agnes Scofield, a first family citizen of the small town, realizes her disillusionment with her life as a teacher – and her family. Attending a family party, with poet Robert Lowell and writer Peter Taylor, family friends, Agnes absorbs the innocuous habits of her family. Their inebriation, both on their own discourse and scotch, disturbs her. Their petty observations and drunken opinions on literature and 50’s American society appalls her. She stuns herself in her disdain and humiliation at having raised children who are now adults – but still remain children in their manner. She sits aghast. She cannot understand her sons or their strange marriages and wonders how her grandchildren cope.

The Yankees and the Dodgers 1953 World Series plants the Yankees in the win, and in this backdrop we view the escarpments within the family – and in the world outside the family. For no family lives within a microcosm and the “profound and the mundane,” states Dew, “are joined at the hip.”

In a serendipitous turnaround, Agnes re figures her life around Sam Howard and her entangled, enmeshed family. In Sam’s optimism and energy, she rewinds the clock of her life and the lives of those around her.

A tempestuous swirl of the 1950’s – 1980’s, Dew intertwines the families’ intricate Southern dynamics into the events that form the macrocosm of post-war America: the Cold War, segregation, the demise of small town hierarchical architecture and families, the fall of agriculture and the rise of technology, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, JFK, Robert Kennedy – as her characters discuss and divest their energies in the topics that swept this era and tore it apart. Historical yet never historical, intimate but always private, the Scofields emerge unscathed with their matriarch, Agnes, baffled but enduring as a true Southern family of the times. As gifted as “Gone With the Wind,” or “Summons to Memphis”, this first family of letters of Washburn, Ohio reflects the turmoil and change of American dynamics.

Ms. Dew, thank you for a stunning novel.

Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel is available at Amazon.com and bookseller nationwide.

Ratings are based on a 5-star scale

Overall: 5
Review by Broad “A” – Ava

We received a copy of this title for our book review. All opinions are our own.

GIVEAWAY

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