The Dollmaker

THE DOLLMAKER

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

 

Nomination: National Book Finalist 1955

 

Date Read: December 7, 2021

 

Gertie Nevels is a survivor. She will do anything for her family – to keep them alive, to keep them safe. From the first pages, we see her not taking no for an answer when she’s trying to save her son Amos. I instantly respected her.

 

And then she caved. I still can’t understand why. Although she’s a grown woman with children of her own, she can’t seem to please her mother regardless of what she does and she ends up bowing to the will of her mother and husband. Just as she’s about to fulfill a lifelong dream, owning a farm of her own, her mother insists she move her and the kids to Detroit to be with her husband, Clovis. Clovis has moved to Detroit to make some good money at the steel mills that are churning out machinery for WWII. Gertie acquiesces and it would be an irreversible decision.

 

Detroit is filthy, unkind, noisy and corrupt. The neighbors in their government project refer to them as hillbilly’s as the Nevel family figures out how to navigate this completely new set of circumstances and entirely new way of living. They have never had indoor plumbing or refrigeration. From the get-go you can tell that Clovis and Gertie are not on the same page. While she believes their time in Detroit is just until the war ends, Clovis is mesmerized by the kinds of “things” he can buy. Gertie doesn’t care about acquiring the latest and greatest; she just wants fresh air and land of her own.

 

Their lives seem to ebb and flow with the availability of Clovis’ work and whether the union is going to strike or not. Clovis refuses for Gertie to work, that is until he realizes there’s a market for her “foolishness,” her whittling. She is a gifted artist and Clovis manages to ruin the joy she gains from working with wood by mechanizing her output to maximize her profit. Again, this is something that Gertie bristles against.

 

In the chaos and cacophony of their government project, they end up losing two of their children: Reuben runs away back to Kentucky, disgusted by the city and his inability to fit in there. And they lose their youngest daughter, Callie, to a tragic train accident. Both of these losses take a huge toll on Gertie and she realizes she would never have lost them if they had remained at home.

 

The Dollmaker is a brilliant glimpse into wartime Detroit, the unions and union-busting that was happening at the time, and what it was like to be in the working class at such an uncertain time. Arnow also gives readers a glimpse of one of millions of families who make the rural to urban transition, a transition that has become permanent in modern America. The Dollmaker is a gem of a book and a little slice of America’s past.