My Antonia by Willa Cather: A truly good summer read

My Antonia by Willa Cather: A truly good summer read
Dover Thrift Edition
175 pp

Some claim that My Antonia, the third and final book of Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy, is her finest work. Bohemian immigrant Antonia Shimerda is depicted through the eyes of orphan boy Jim Burden, who comes to live with his grandparents in Nebraska after his own parents have died. My Antonia is meant to be the story of Jim Burden’s life—his remembrance of things past—of the life that he shared with Antonia, her family, and with his grandparents.

But Jim Burden is never fully fleshed out as a boy, as a young man, and later as a mature man. There is no depth to his sexual awakening or his sexual passion, and certainly no explanation as to why he eventually ends up married to a society woman who is artistically painted as a shallow dullard.

Jim Burden’s purported  memoir of Antonia is too well crafted to be of his own making. Willa Cather uses Jim Burden as a beard to substitute for her own affections and longing for Antonia. It is quite clear that the real admirer of Antonia Shimerda is the author herself.

Using Jim Burden’s story as “the bulk of the story” is the only flaw in this great work of art. The lush descriptions of rural Nebraska in the late 1880s are unparalleled in offering us the dramatic beauty of life on the farm. Far beyond the whims of the author and her fictional characters, My Antonia is really the story of life on the Nebraska prairie. The lives of  everyone are tethered together in a time and place surely as beautiful as the frivolity of summer, where the descending cascade of light illuminates those things in the world that pass this way only once in a lifetime.