I loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but unfortunately, Betty Smith’s Joy in the Morning isn’t anywhere near that calibre. Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Although Annie is only 18, she travels from Brooklyn to a midwestern university where Carl is attending law school. They are married, and the novel is about their first difficult year.
The couple are far away from friends and they have very little money. They go through the expected adjustments and she becomes pregnant. Annie wants to be a writer. Unfortunately, the reader is subjected to samples from diaries, short stories, and plays that are uniformly dreadful. I have to wonder at the couple of professors in the novel who think she might be gifted. (The irony is, of course, that Smith was gifted, and if these samples were really her own from that period of her life, then the professors saw something in them that I cannot.)
The novel often explores trite situations and has a very uniform plot line, without much of an arc. The dialog is extremely unsophisticated. When I read this novel, I hypothesized that perhaps it was Smith’s first. However, it was actually published last, in 1963. As with other Smith books, I suspect that the novel is at least partially autobiographical, although she apparently never admitted that of any of her books.
What? Me Read? 