"How Big Is My Baby?"

Life in High Prairie--A Novel with a Theme

The Story.* To Selina Peake, girl, aged 19, her father gives the following advice: "The more kinds of people you see, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things. That's living."

Soon Selina has a chance to test what he says. For her father dies-- he is, though she has never known it, a professional gambler--killed by a bullet that was intended for someone else. He leaves her two blue-white diamonds and an envelope containing $497.

Obliged to earn her living, Selina goes out to teach school at an "incredibly Dutch settlement" in the suburbs of Chicago. It is called High Prairie; its inhabitants are truck farmers; it is dreary enough to make Gopher Prairie look like a corner at Oxford Circus. While there she marries Pervus Dejong, impecunious farmer. Immediately she finds herself being dragged down to the level of High Prairie life.

A son, Dirk, is born. Then Selina realizes the full falsity, as it seems to her, of her father's words. Well, one thing is certain. She will save Dirk from the same sort of life.

Of course Pervus would not understand this. So she keeps her idea a secret. And then, when Dirk is aged ten, Pervus dies.

One day when Selina goes to Chicago to try to sell some of her produce, she runs into Julie Hempel, old schooldays' friend. Julie's father, Aug Hempel, ex-butcher, is by this time one of the world's largest meatpackers. He offers to give Selina whatever she wishes. She will take nothing, except a loan--enough to modernize her farm. And with her modernized farm she educates Dirk.

Dirk grows, becomes an architect, with promise of being successful. It seems to Selina that the sacrifice that she has made of her whole life is justified. But Dirk is in love with Julie's daughter, already married. Since the daughter cannot marry him she wishes at least to make him successful, leads him into the world of finance. He thinks that he is successful, but his mother's heart is suffering.

In the end, Selina's heart is mended by the return of Roelf Pool, onetime Dutch boy she used to teach in High Prairie, now a famed artist, who recognizes in her the one who started him on his career. And Dirk discovers that he is really in love with Dallas O'Mara, girl artist, and-- realizing that they two don't live in the same world--is led to question (bitterly) his ostensibly shining success.

The Significance. Like so many novelists equipped with an extremely adequate popular technique, Edna Ferber has been impelled by the spirit of the times into attempting something "serious." So Big is the result--a novel with a theme. When Dirk De Jong was a little boy, Selina used to ask him "How big is my baby?" Then Dirk would stretch his arms and answer "So big!" But just how big was he at the end of the story? As is often the case, the theme is more important to the writer than to the reader. What the reader remembers gratefully is the picture of High Prairie, the portrayal of such characters as Pervus, Selina herself, Dirk, Julie, and Millionaire Hempel, ex-butcher. These are done understandingly and clearly, neither after the fashion of the modern realists nor the old sentimentalists--with enough of the above-mentioned adequate technique to make the book thoroughly interesting, if not--in any sense of the word--great.

*So BIG--Edna Ferber--Doubleday ($2.00).