Making of Americans

<p>The Making of Americans </em>is not really a novel as Gertrude Stein's narrator says-not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you-but an attempt at a thorough and exacting distillation of the essential properties of peoples' behavior. Through sentences that seem to repeat themselves we are presented on the surface with a portrait of the simple middle class monotonous tradition as enacted by generations of the Dehning and Hersland families and their acquaintances. Underneath this is a slow sieved attempt at something like total knowledge an excavation of an overwhelming impulse to understand the complete being in each one and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling...anything in them that gives to them inside them the feeling of being distinguished to themselves inside them.</p>