Comments and reviews of The Magnificent Ambersons flow steady and heavy on the Internet, and I generally don’t comment on them.

In light of recent developments in world financial markets, though, the following blog entry about Ambersons caught my attention:

If you haven’t, give this old Booth Tarkington a read. I felt nothing for the main character in the end other than that he reaped what he sowed.

… which is, coincidentally, how I feel about all the foolhardy investors who are losing their shirts in this economic meltdown.

(No, this is not an invitation to talk about the greater economic ramifications. Just a thought.)

Also, this crisis is actually happening all over Europe and Asia as well. Every country’s banks fed off people biting off more than they could chew.

The comparison is certainly apropos. But in Ambersons, of course, Tarkington was recreating the mood of financial crises that he had lived through as a youth, and the Great Depression was still a thing beyond most Americans’ dreams.

Later, though, Tarkington wrote some really fine novels about the Great Depression and its effects.  Young Mrs. Greely anticipated the really big 1929 stock market crash, and The Heritage of Hatcher Ide, Three Selected Short Novels, and Kate Fennigate are all fine examinations of the effects of the Depression on upper-middleclass Americans of the sort the blogger above calls “foolhardy.”  Even The Image of Josephine examines these effects in a small way.

Tarkington was fine humanist, though, so don’t look for disdain of foolhardiness; look for empathy and compassion.  When he talks about men throwing themselves out of the windows of financial institutions, he’s not chortling.

And if you want something of a more populist bent about poverty, check out The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories, or even the Penrod books.