Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse
by John D. Fitzgerald
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Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis): 1961. Hardcover: 250 pages. Tags: Catholic church; coming-of-age; frontier; gambling; Mainstream; mining towns; newspapers; Pennsylvania; Utah Tactical strength: [6/10] |
If you have read any of John D. Fitzgerald's books for youth from The Great Brain series, you will already know that a "family tradition" requires all Fitzgerald sons to have the middle name "Dennis." William Dennis Fitzgerald grew up in Boylestown, Pennsylvania, where his father runs the local newspaper. On Will's eighteenth birthday his father explains to him the family curse. Six generations earlier, Dennis Fitzgerald betrayed his Irish family to the English. Dennis's father had Dennis killed and decreed that all Fitzgerald sons should bear the name of "Dennis" to remind them of the treachery. Dennis's betrayal caused six men to lose their lives, and the fathers of those men got together and placed a six generation curse on the Fitzgeralds. The curse decrees that for the next six generations, one of the Fitzgerald sons will grow up Godless and die in one of six terrible ways.
Since Will has denied his Catholicism and basically run wild about town his whole life, his father assumes that Will carries the curse and will "meet a fate worse than death" (65). Insulted that his father believes in the curse, Will declares his intention to leave for the West. Will plans to become a professional gambler and believes that he will do better in an environment where he will live by his wits and the quickness of his fists and his gun.
The next section of the book describes Will arriving in St. Louis and spending about two years learning the trade of gambling. He easily falls in with the gambling crowd and makes friends that willingly teach him the trade. After will earns $10,000 at a high stakes poker game, he takes his winnings and heads to Utah to begin to establish a gambling empire. On advice from one of his mentors, he moves into a small mining town, Silver Plume, and plans on growing his gambling empire along with the growth of the town.
While Will's development as a gambler provides interesting reading, this work doesn't have the same narrative flow or character development that we have come to expect from a traditional novel. Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse, like the books in The Great Brain series, has a more episodic feeling, even though we follow the exploits of a single individual from about age fifteen to late twenties. The plot remains engaging, but you don't ever get a sense of the traditional conflict one would expect from a novel, where the character has some flaw or trait he must overcome. Will never really has much opposition. He easily gains the object of his first sexual conquest; he easily learns the trade skills of the professional gambler; and he easily amasses the money he needs to establish his saloon empire. The real conflict comes from his inability to find a woman to marry. He tries a couple relationships based on sex, and those relationships fail. He tries a relationship based on loving an ideal, and the very pious woman rejects him because of his profession. Only at the end does he find a woman, Queenie, with a similar background who accepts Will without him having to make any changes. This really doesn't qualify as Will making any big personality change to find a woman to marry as much as just having the patience to wait until the right woman comes along. Since we don't see through to the end of Will's life, we don't know for sure if he has beaten the Fitzgerald curse. After almost losing Queenie in an accident, Will decides that dying without having left a positive, charitable mark on the world qualifies as a fate worse than death, and Will resolves to "thank God for giving [him] a second chance to justify [his] existence upon this earth and earn the right to have men say good things about [him] over [his] grave" (250).
Unlike Fitzgerald's later books for young audiences, he has written Uncle Will and the Fitzgerald Curse for adult readers. He writes several scenes that imply masturbation without direct description and explicitly describes Will's sexual attitudes and exploits. Aside from these more mature themes, Fitzgerald displays the same ability to evoke the time and place as other Fitzgerald works. You get a pretty clear picture of life in a frontier mining town, and you care about what happens to Will, even though the successes in his life come way too easily.
