The Turmoil

Bibbs Sheridan

Bibbs is the Sheridan who fails to fit: too thoughtful, too unambitious, too easily tired by the family's roaring world of business and display. His father's favorite flourish—that his boys must double the yield of every field—lands on him as a sentence rather than an inspiration, and his quiet drift through the house and the office marks him as the family's disappointment. Yet his difference is the novel's opening wedge: through Bibbs, Tarkington asks whether a man can be worth something his father's ledger cannot measure.

Mary Vertrees

Mary Vertrees is the daughter of a household that still keeps its Landseers and its manners while the money quietly runs out, and she is practical enough to know what that means. When she lets Bibbs bring her home and laughs with her mother about how fast she got along with him, she is both candid and calculating, aware that the Sheridans next door represent something her family needs. Her clear-eyed presence gives Bibbs a mirror in which his own difference might be worth something.

James Sheridan

Sheridan dominates every table he sits at: thirty teeth, none bought, a voice that carries over the orchestra, and a boyish vanity in his own achievement. He is genuinely happy in his power, yet his grief for his dead son Jim is measured almost entirely in lost business—Jim was the one who would have kept the property growing. That hunger for succession, and his bafflement at the son who won't share it, is the engine of the family's trouble.

Roscoe Sheridan

Roscoe is the son Sheridan counts on now that Jim is gone, the one who shows up and does the work—until his father finds him slumped in his office, bloodshot and incoherent, refusing to say a word about the young Lamhorn. His collapse is a quiet catastrophe: the dependable one coming apart while the family's attention is elsewhere. He matters because his fracture exposes how much of the Sheridan edifice rests on men who cannot afford to feel anything.

Sibyl Sheridan

Sibyl moves through the Sheridan household with a grievance she never quite states and a memory for every slight. When she learns of the letter Mary Vertrees wrote to Jim, her perplexity gives way to a glow of triumph—the guilty, after all, have not been exalted. Her small, sharp victories are the novel's reminder that in this family even the bystanders are keeping score.

Edith Sheridan

Edith fights her father every other evening and keeps her bed between times so he can see what his violence has done to her, then extracts a cheque and a trip to New York under the guise of forgetting. She is not gentle so much as determined, and Sheridan's heavy-handed campaign to cool her only sets her further on fire. Her rebellion is the family drama in miniature: the harder the old man clamps down, the more the young slip free.