I absolutely loved this book, rather unexpectedly, I might add. The absolute hopelessness of being a 17-year-old teenage boy in love for the first time, with competitors amongst friends for her attention, along with your pesky younger sister that is totally onto you, not to mention parents who do not know exactly what to do is brilliantly captured in a remarkably humorous way in this early 1900s' story of good ole middle class mid-America. With so many of these coming-of-age books from this era written from the female perspective, this was a delightful change of voice, especially since i can so vividly remember those frustrating and awkward aspects of my own teenage years.

I know there are some occasionally jarring racial references that could lead one to toss this on the junk discard pile with disgust....but i seem to see these things in a slightly different light than some others. The references are merely a record of how these things were viewed and talked about in the time of this book's writing, and while there may be some stereotypical depictions of race, they are no more stereotypical than that of a lovesick ranting & raving teenage boy and the puff-ball that is his love interest.....all positively ridiculous. And to me, the good news is that those moments are startling and jarring....a potent reminder as to how far we have come.....by no means the end of the journey, but amazing progress....for which we should all be grateful.

I have enjoyed practically every Tarkington i have read thus far, but I feel that the comedy of this will stay with me...thank you Mr. Tarkington. ( )

I enjoyed the book enough when I read it in the 1960s to keep it until now. Alas, I tried to read it again and it no longer works for me.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2736686.html

Seventeen: A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William was the best-selling novel in America a hundred years ago, in 1916. If its author is remembered at all today, it is for The Magnificent Ambersons which came out in 1918, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted to become an Orson Welles film in 1942. Seventeen was also filmed, in 1940, starring Jackie Cooper and Betty Field though not in their best known roles. (I note that one of the minor parts is played by a "Hal Clement"; presumably not the sf author, who would have been a Harvard undergraduate in 1940.)

Anyway, it is the story of seventeen-year-old William Baxter of an unnamed town in Indiana (though Tarkington was an Indianapolis man), during a summer when the lovely Lola Pratt comes to stay with the neighbours, and William along with the other seventeen-year-old boys of the neighbourhood decides to pay court to her.

I was rather turned off by the book at first because William is pretty callow even for a seventeen-year-old in literature, and Lola, whose entire conversation consists of baby talk with her dog, is even worse. There's also some good ol' racism in the treatment of the local black odd-job man, Genesis. But actually once I got into it, I started to appreciate some of the characters a bit more - William's mother, who tries to mediate between her son's actuakl and perceived needs, and especially Lola's host, Mr Parcher, who is at the sharp end of observing her infantile behaviour and her court of admirers. There's a lovely moment for him at the end of Chapter 27, as the farewell party for Lola reaches its end:

At half past one the orchestra played “Home, Sweet Home.” As the last bars sounded, a group of earnest young men who had surrounded the lovely guest of honor, talking vehemently, broke into loud shouts, embraced one another and capered variously over the lawn. Mr. Parcher beheld from a distance these manifestations, and then, with an astonishment even more profound, took note of the tragic William, who was running toward him, radiant—Miss Boke hovering futilely in the far background.
“What’s all the hullabaloo?” Mr. Parcher inquired.
“Miss Pratt!” gasped William. “Miss Pratt!”
“Well, what about her?”
And upon receiving William’s reply, Mr. Parcher might well have discerned behind it the invisible hand of an ironic but recompensing Providence making things even—taking from the one to give to the other.
“She’s going to stay!” shouted the happy William. “She’s promised to stay another week!”
And then, mingling with the sounds of rejoicing, there ascended to heaven the stricken cry of an elderly man plunging blindly into the house in search of his wife.
And even the treatment of Genesis improves, especially as William's annoying (but much more sensible) little sister Jane becomes an ally in subverting her brother's plans.

At the same time, it's curiously innocent in some ways. William's parents' worst fear is that he might take it into his head to elope with Lola and marry her, a possibility of which he is only vaguely aware and in which she appears utterly uninterested. The prospect of pregnancy (let alone contraception) is simply not mentioned, except when Genesis reminisces to the uncomprehending Jane and William about his early life. (Later in 1916, Joyce published a book in which his teenage protagonist has sex.) Although William and his rivals are supposedly in their later teens, they are somewhat infantilised - and Lola even more so. And the author's humour at the expense of Youth tends uncomfortably towards sneering rather than gentle.

Anyway, I've read this, so you don't have to. It is mercifully short. ( )

I read this with wincing recognition of being seventeen and blindly in love with someone completely inappropriate. In this novel, the Beloved Object is particularly amusing; her complete mastery of baby talk is astoundingly irritating, yet Tarkington gives her just enough depth to make you want to read on. William, our lovelorn hero, suffers through tribulations related to his clothing, the machinations of his little sister (who fails to give him the respect that his advanced age and status deserve) and competition with his peers for the affection of the Beloved Object. Funny, charming and true to life, even a century later. The only caveat: it is a product of its time, so there is some stereotyping and dialect that will make most modern readers a little uncomfortable. ( )

One of my all-time favorite books, this light-hearted story is sadly hard-to-find now, being a tad dated and, as a result, too un-politically correct for the modern critic's taste. If you can overlook a minor bit of racial characterization that was not, at the time, intended to offend, what you find is a delightful period comedy, superbly told in a meaning-laden, wink-and-nudge style.

Young William, the protagonist, is seventeen years old, and it becomes immediatley clear that seventeen, even at the turn of the century, suffered the same overbearing self-importance, irrational mood-swinging, and inflated melodrama that it does today. William is an everyboy in middle America, and the book follows his misadventures the fateful summer when he falls, for the first time, helplessly in love. A neighbor's visiting friend: glamorous, coquettish, flirtatious, and an incessant spouter of charming "baby-talk" turns his life upside-down, to the consternation of his family and the amusement of us all. Hindered in his romantic pursuits by a bevy of like-minded lads, his flawlessly characterized little sister, and his long-suffering parents, he flounders from joy to heartache and back again with a believability that will set teens blushing in sympathy and adults chuckling, if they remember anything about their first crush.

Characters are delightfully drawn, and the writing is first rate, with phrases and sentences deliciously crafted to draw out every nuance. People just don't write this way anymore. ( )