Now in November is a 1934 novel by Josephine Johnson.
It is basically The Grapes of Wrath, if the Joads had been able to stay on their farm. Arnold Hardmarne, having lost his job in a factory, takes his family—wife Willa, and daughters Kerrin, Marget (the narrator, who at the start of the story is 10), and Merle—to their ancestral plot of land in hopes of making it pay. But the life of a farmer is hard, and as it happens, Arnold isn't all that great at farming and doesn't like it. And as it turns out, the land is heavily mortgaged.
Ten years pass. The family continues to live hand to mouth, going through the backbreaking labor of farm work, never getting ahead, always only barely able to make the mortgage payment. Kerrin, the feisty, spirited eldest daughter, begins to behave more erratically. Arnold is worn down by the endless drudgery. The family takes in a farmhand, a man named Grant, and a now-grown Marget falls in love with him—but Grant has eyes only for Merle. And just when things seem like they couldn't get worse, a terrible drought comes, and makes things worse.
Tropes:
- All Love Is Unrequited: Both Marget and Kerrin fall in love with Grant, the farmhand. Marget can only wish desperately that Grant would love her. Kerrin eventually makes a bold sexual advance and is rejected. Grant is not interested in either of them, because he has fallen in love with Merle, only Merle isn't interested in him.
- Character Narrator: Marget, narrating the desperate poverty that was life as a small farmer in the 1920s and 1930s.
- Downer Beginning: The Hardmarnes arrive at the farm after Arnold loses his job and has had to sell almost everything he owns. Arnold, who doesn't really like farming and left the family farm when he was a teenager nearly 40 years ago, reveals that the farm is mortgaged. They have to stay in a dilapidated old farm house covered with weeds.
- Downer Ending: After a Downer Beginning and a Downer Middle in a book that is just a series of downers. Willa is badly burned in a fire, and soon dies. Kerrin, who has been mentally ill for a while, kills herself. Grant, the one person who brought some sort of hope into Marget's life, leaves. They are all still trapped by poverty and debt, and Marget on the last page of the book anticipates her father growing old and weak and the debt devolving on to her.
- Down on the Farm: A particularly grim example, as a family struggles to make it on a stony farm plagued by drought. They mostly fail, and have nothing to look forward to but more poverty and misery.
- Driven to Suicide: Kerrin grows stranger and more unstable as the book goes on, and is plainly becoming mentally ill. Finally, her mother getting badly injured in a fire, and Grant rejecting her, leads her to kill herself. When they find her body, dead from slashed wrists, Marget reflects that it's the first time she ever saw Kerrin quiet.
- Fiery Redhead: Kerrin has hair that Marget describes as "like a thick red light." She is high-strung and spirited with a sharp temper. She is also the sort of person who, even when she was a child, practices throwing knives, or goes off to sleep in the barn just because she wants to. This trope eventually is subverted, however, when Kerrin's fiery spirit develops into actual mental illness, something like bipolar disorder.
- Foreshadowing: At one point Marget is in the woods and feeling happy and hopeful and one with nature. Then she stops herself and reflects that lots of things, like, say, a drought, could ruin what very little they've been able to build. That is exactly what happens, as a drought comes and leaves the family devastated and on the brink of eviction.
- Funetik Aksent: For Old Man Rothman, owner of a neighboring farm, and a German immigrant. When complaining of his withered strawberry crop he calls them "The Gottdamn little measles!...We can't eat all dem tinks."
- Happy Rain: Subverted. One particularly cruel Hope Spot has a storm come to the area. Dark clouds roll over, and there's a clap of thunder. Big drops of rain fall, and the family, deliriously happy that the terrible drought is over at last, starts pulling out washtubs to catch the rain. Then the clouds part, the rain stops as quickly as it started, and the drought continues.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: Kerrin shouting obscenities at her father is described by Marget as her "screaming out words that I'd heard only once in life before."
- Oblivious to Love: Grant never does realize that Marget is in love with him, and for that matter, Merle never figures out that Grant is in love with her.
- Shout-Out: Kerrin says that their father reminds her of King Lear and wonders if maybe Lear's daughters were in the right.
- Title Drop: The first sentence of the novel, in fact the first three words, as Marget, ten years after the family came to the farm, is remembering when they arrived.Now in November I can see our years as a whole.
