One of Ours
I often thought of Jacob's Room while reading One of Ours: both are about the boyhood and youth of men who will die in World War I. But whereas Jacob Flanders is a negative space, defined by the needs and desires of those who crowd around him and wonder what is the secret of one so blank and beautiful, Claude Wheeler is someone we get to know from the inside; unlike the maddeningly (apparently) self-sufficient Jacob, Claude projects his hopes and fears hither and thither, in the ardent and disorganized fashion of one whose education came too little and too late and who feels alienated from everything he grew up with. Claude seizes on the war as an escape from his unhappiness, as a source of meaning that is truly bottomless, that won't disappoint because war is incomprehensible.
One of Ours was published in 1923, one year after Jacob's Room, and it's a far more traditional novel in every way. While I love Jacob's Room, Cather's novel made me appreciate the costs of Woolf's denials: no, you shall not get to know the main character; no, the war had no meaning. Cather presents the excitement and the patriotism of her characters without anger, and sometimes comes close to endorsing it. In its strongest form the patriotism is francophilia — France as the opposite of Nebraska — which complicates the picture.

"On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely:

Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them, — what they were and what they might have been."

So far so good; Woolf does not write at such a low, relaxed pitch, but the sentiments are similar to those in Jacob's Room. Then Cather writes:

The name that stood was La France.

Woolf would never have written that, not even in the voice of a character. But the engagement with patriotism, with the idea that the war could have seemed meaningful to those who died in it, is rewarding and thought-provoking.

Like Fielding and Eliot, Cather passes judgment on her character: "He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country ever can be."

But there's so much more to One of Ours: the painful, beautiful scene in which a father tries and fails to reject his daughter's suitor out of concern for him, not for her, is one I've read aloud twice already.

One of Ours may not be as perfect and as devastating as Lucy Gayheart or The Professor's House, but it's nearly as good, and certainly as good as O Pioneers!.