[October Light is a] strange but often beautiful and touching account of two lonely, elderly people, caught up in their memories, their convictions, and their prejudices…. October Light examines American culture and values retrospectively and, at least at the end, prospectively. Some of those values, embodied in these two sturdy Vermonters and their friends, seem in danger of extinction, about to be swept away by a crasser, younger generation that, paradoxically, they themselves have bred. The title of the book and much of its writing seems to indicate that even in Vermont, or especially there, we are witnessing the twilight of our civilization—a sad, briefly exhilarating period that will relentlessly pass into a dark, wintry time. There are many signs of decadence and degeneration. For example,… Sally reads a paperback novel that her grandnephew found in the pigstye and accidentally left behind. Though torn and soiled, with frequent gaps of missing pages, it provides a fascination for her, and she reads the whole thing. An ostensibly cheap thriller filled with sensationalistic accounts of attempted suicides, dope smuggling, sexual license, and other tawdriness, this novel-within-the-novel contrasts and compares with the main events and, in part, offers an oblique running commentary. At one point Sally glimpses that the thriller she is reading is about Capitalism, about the same values her brother holds dear—"An Hour's Work for an Hour's Pay, and Don't Tread on Me, and Semper Fidelis!" If so, it is an utter parody of that system and its values, although how conscious or deliberate a parody she is not sure, and at times Gardner's writing of these episodes rises well above the level he is apparently mocking. Both stories portray more or less unflatteringly the Rugged Individual of a former age, but the alternative of an effeminate dependency is hardly more attractive.
What emerges, then, from James's experience—intolerance of his sister's modern notions, a drunken rampage, his daughter Ginny's almost fatal accident—is a sense that while many of the values he holds dear are still worth preserving, they need not exclude others that may be more compatible with his own than he had previously thought. (p. 841)
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