Windy McPherson's Son by Sherwood Anderson

Windy McPherson's Son by Sherwood Anderson

Although in the realm of coming-of-age stories I think Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the best work this year, Sherwood Anderson’s Windy McPherson’s Son is another formidable coming of age story published this year. Anderson is a fascinating character. He grew up in Ohio, moved to Chicago and worked a series of blue-collar jobs of manual labor, and ended up married and back in Ohio only to eventually suffer a mental breakdown, divorce his wife, and move back to Chicago to write Windy McPherson’s Son. This novel reminds me of de Balzac’s Lost Illusions from his work The Human Comedy. It’s about a newspaper boy, Sam McPherson, from a small-town in Ohio who moves to Chicago to become a successful business man. Well, Sam’s escapades in Chicago result in financial success and popularity. But, as Sam gets richer and more popular, he becomes more and more dissatisfied with life. Just like Lucien in de Balzac’s Lost Illusions. Eventually, after growing dreadfully unhappy, Sam finds solace in his family, again, just like Lucien. But what makes Anderson’s novel unique is his voice. Throughout the novel, Anderson maintains his distinct colloquial voice of narration, and, as a result, has produced one of the most engaging books chronicling an individual American experience. Because of this, Anderson could potentially become an important American voice chronicling a human struggling in the modern world full of materialism, capitalism, war, formality, anonymity, and other maladies of the industrial society many people find themselves in.