Jack Skeffington in Yale Campus Press:
In the introduction to Not Under Forty, Willa Cather’s 1936 collection of essays, she (in)famously writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” an opinion that, if nothing else, has fairly successfully separated her from the ranks of artists and authors we have come to call modernists.
…Cather’s The Professor’s House first saw print in 1925, in a post-Ulysses world whose literary landscape Cather no longer felt herself part of. The novel is largely concerned with one Godfrey St. Peter, the owner of the titular domicile, and his arrival at a point where his work, his marriage, his family, and (despite that title) both of his houses all enter a state of flux. Retreat into memory, especially memory concerning his favorite student, Tom Outland, forms a major portion of the Professor’s coping strategy, an so, in turn, the action of the novel.
In All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman writes that modernity “is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’”[2] Cather’s novel, as much as any other produced on either side of her supposed divide, participates in this uncertainty, in the exploration of a culture’s perceived experience of unified disunity, of a totalizing fracture. Despite Cather’s claim to have “slid back into the previous 7000 years,” The Professor’s House bears the marks of its era, telling the tale of a broken man in a distinctly fractured way.
More here. (Note: Watching Mad Men and reading Willa Cather’s deeply disturbing and insightful comments on the human condition in The Professor’s House was strangely satisfying. The book is startlingly fresh for present times.)