Review of Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson

“The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?”

— Josephine Winslow Johnson

I don’t know when I first heard about this novel, but I’m pretty sure I saw it on one of my recommendation sites. I find out about books through a strange, slightly eclectic mixture of websites, so I’m confident this is where I found out about this one. The premise of Now in November isn’t what sold me about; it was the author herself. In 1935, this book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Johnson the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was twenty-four. To this day, Josephine Johnson is still the youngest Pulitzer Fiction prize winner, which is pretty impressive, especially considering she was a young woman in the thirties writing about relevant social issues.

Even more interesting to add into this mix is the fact this was only her first ever published novel and supposedly wrote this while lviing in her mother’s attic. As a writer currently living in her own mother’s home, I spiritually vibe with this fact. Now in November was her most prominent work she published, and she may have never managed to live up to the accolades, but much to admire about Johnson.

Anyways, onwards with the review and summary.

Set during the Dust Bowl, a family’s failing farm becomes their only source of income.

The protagonist in Now in November is Marget, who is only ten when the novel begins. We learn about the events unfolding through her perspective, and as she grows older, the increasing devastation brought about by the circumstances of the time period.

The novel begins with this fact: her family, which was solidly middle class, has entered a contract for a farm when her father loses his job. In order to take on this farm, he has to take out an extensive mortgage, which I believe was about a decade long, but there’s something important to remember: the Dust Bowl is about to happen in American history, which would leave their crops and output to be pretty bad.

Which is exactly what happens. With her mother and sisters, they all begin to help out on the farm, but are pretty insufficient for the kind of lifestyle required for farming. They weren’t farmers before, but because their income relies on the output, everyone has to help whenever possible.

The three daughters are drastically different from each other, and these divisions will lead to some pretty devastating consequences by the end of the book. Many years pass throughout the course of the book, but an overwhelming sense of hopelessness slowly begins to bleed into everything going on.

The atmosphere of the book itself, how it focuses on the location and its finer details, adds to this sense of doom and gloom.

The narrator—and by extension, Johnson—focuses a lot on the natural world and how it’s shifting, and our protagonist/narrator ends up focusing not only on the family’s relationship to it, but also the animals. The animals end up suffering because of the conditions face by the family, thus showing the cyclical nature of everything going on and how we’re interconnected to everything at the end of the day.

Inside the home, Marget and her sister, Merle, do a lot of the household chores. Their father typically takes care of manual labor with one of his assistants, who ends up leaving by the time the novel is over, placing the family in an even worse situation after what’s to come.

The one sister, Kerrin, becomes a textbook example of what mental illness could look like in this time period, but I would say she’s been given a generous depiction by the writer considering when this was written.

Eventually, at the end of the novel, a fire ends up breaking out on the farm. Marget’s mother gets caught up in the flames, and the remainder of the novel discusses how she is unable to live normally, and, by the end, succumbs to her injuries.

One of her sisters, the one who was always considered strange and crass, Kerrin, ends up killing herself, creating even more tragedy out of what has happened. It seems like buying this farm lead to devastation in the family’s life, leaving them in more poverty than they started off with.

Overall Thoughts

I ended up reading this novel while sitting outside, simply enjoying the sun, as it’s a really quick read. A lot of the prose runs through in a way that’s fairly fluid, moving from one chapter tot he next in a way that’s not difficult to read at all.

I found this to be an interesting contrast towards other Dust Bowl novels (Steinbeck, looking at you) because of how it frames the interaction with the natural world and people through the lens of a woman.

It isn’t trying too hard to make sweeping statements about the time period as a whole, but the faith and stoicism of their parents will do nothing for the sisters in the end. Even faith can be burned, and stoicism broken at the face of tragedy. That’s life at it’s core, which is why I admire Now in November.

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