So Big

Selina DeJong

Raised in hotel lobbies and boardinghouse parlors by a charming, itinerant gambler, Selina arrives in High Prairie as a schoolteacher with more imagination than practical sense. Marriage to a stoic Dutch farmer and years of grubbing vegetables out of stubborn earth sharpen rather than dim her — she borrows money, learns the commission markets, and builds DeJong asparagus into a name the merchants seek a year ahead. Her fierce, unappeasable hope for her son Dirk is the engine of the book: she wants him bigger than the prairie, and the novel keeps asking what that wanting costs.

Dirk DeJong

Dirk grows up well liked and effortlessly average, blessed with the social gift of listening while others talk, and everyone — especially his mother — reads a future into his fine, inclined head. He is neither brilliant nor driven, and the novel watches him slide from a general university course into tailoring, roadsters, a Japanese houseman, and the correct little pile of invitations on the console. His quiet dissatisfaction, and the gap between what Selina sacrificed for and what he became, is the ache at the center of the book's middle stretch.

Dallas O'Mara

Dallas arrives in Dirk's office as a successful illustrator who still thinks nine dollars is a lot of money, and she unsettles him precisely because she sees life from the same angle his mother does. Her slow wide smile and unhurried honesty expose the hollowness of his tailored Chicago existence without ever lecturing him. She matters because she is the test the novel sets for Dirk: whether he can recognize a woman of real substance when she is standing in front of him, or whether he will keep choosing the correct and the easy.

Roelf Pool

Roelf is the Klaas Pool family's unlikely yield — a boy who read too much and saw too sharply for the flat, thrifty prairie that raised him, and who left it to become an artist. His sculpture The Seine scandalizes High Prairie with its nude, sinuous figure, and Selina, who once taught him, is the only one who understands what he has made. He returns late in the book as a famous, gentle man of forty-five, proof that the prairie could produce something other than crops and thrift — and a quiet rebuke to what Dirk settled for.

Pauline

Paula — Pauline Arnold, later Paula Storm — is the glittering counterexample to Selina's grubbing life, a woman who trades beauty and charm for a lakefront estate, rose-brocade guest rooms, and a husband who telephones that he'll be late. She is generous, careless, and entirely at home in the world of money that Dirk covets, and she gives him his first real taste of how the other half lives. Her ease and her emptiness both matter: she shows the reader what Dirk is reaching for, and how little it actually nourishes.

Pervus DeJong

Pervus DeJong is the plain, decent, unremarkable farmer Selina marries — a man of the soil in the most literal sense, whose wants are small and whose imagination is smaller. He works his worn-out truck farm without complaint and without vision, and the novel is honest that Selina's love never quite made him the figure she had hoped for. His early death leaves her the land, the debts, and the chance to prove that she, not he, could make the DeJong acres bloom — the pivot on which the whole middle of the book turns.