Being Polite to Hitler

Beth E. Andersen

National Book Award winner Dew (for Dale Loves Sophie to Death) uses her signature elegant and often delightfully funny style to move seamlessly back and forth between the macro- and microcosm of the new America. Her latest should generate demand for the first two series titles as well.
— Library Journal

Lisa Kay Greissinger

A winning, quietly lyrical account of a simpler time.
— People

Suzanne Berne

A novel that considers, as its provocative title suggests, how people can go on being pleasant in a world that is frequently terrible....It's in her careful delineations of the quotidian that Dew writes most piercingly....She is not interested in tormenting her characters; being human every day, she feels, is hard enough.
— The New York Times

Jim Carmin

And this is what Being Polite to Hitler is all about: a 20-year sliver of Agnes Scofield's life. Robb Forman Dew, who won a National Book Award in 1982 for Dale Loves Sophie to Death, has captured again, beautifully, the poetry of the everyday. Her narrative flows effortlessly from character to character, from voice to voice, as does her sense of time, from present to future to past and back again.... Dew's elegant words capture personalities so well, as well as setting.... In Being Polite to Hitler, with lush, graceful language, Robb Forman Dew reminds us that much of what we consider to be ordinary in our lives, in the end, turns out to be quite extraordinary.
— The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Good Housekeeping

Dew's quietly powerful tale is riveting.

Caroline Leavitt

Dew follows 54-year-old Agnes Scofield through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as she reinvents herself, navigating both the mine fields of rapidly changing country and family. Every sentence is a rhapsody.''
— The Miami Herald

Meg Wolitzer

highly original.... Robb Forman Dew covers both the cosmic and the quotidian as she follows a formidably intermingled group of people in the town of Washburn, Ohio. The novel, which resides mostly in the 1950s until an acceleration near the end yanks everyone all the way up to 1973, beautifully chronicles the experiences of a widowed schoolteacher, Agnes Scofield, and those in her midst.... Dew's novels identify and describe not just a town and its people but the American mind-set at particular moments in time.... Dew also sprinkles her storytelling with inventively apt asides, as when a character explains how a dog's stomach can spontaneously twist, "the way a lemon drop is wrapped." This sort of casual juxtaposition is ingenious and surprising. Being Polite to Hitler is a deeply knowing novel—progressive, certainly, and at times quietly, thrillingly strange.
— New York Times Book Review

Susan Salter Reynolds

If you've been reading Robb Forman Dew these many years, fiction and nonfiction, you know that she is, like her main character Agnes Scofield, the consummate matriarch. There is beauty and order in her sentences and in the lives of her characters. There is trauma, pain and uncertainty but also a community of spirit beneath all of her books.... This novel shows why history is supplemented and often surpassed by fiction, by the fleshing out, the empathy, the imagining of lives lived and lost in the not-so-distant past.
— Los Angeles Times

Rachel Basch

a remarkable achievement, a vividly detailed and deeply textured mural of a century of American life.... Dew deploys a dazzling number of narrative perspectives.... Dew zooms into the hearts and minds of her characters with the kind of acuity that reminds us why we read.... Throughout the novel, Dew renders the political personal and the personal incandescent.
— The Washington Post

The Barnes & Noble Review

In Robb Forman Dew's multi-generational trilogy set in Washburn, Ohio, "the profound and the mundane are joined at the hip" -- as they are in life. Her saga is thus at once narrowly focused and expansive, microscopic and macroscopic, personal and political. Evoking both Anne Tyler (especially The Amateur Marriage) and Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge, Dew writes about fortunate middle Americans who go through life absorbed by petty and intimate details, and are only infrequently focused on weightier world events, "the atmosphere in which they lived."

In The Evidence Against Her (2001), The Truth of the Matter (2005), and now Being Polite to Hitler, Dew spins an intricate, occasionally plodding, but cumulatively addictive story rooted in the lives of three close friends all born on the same day, September 15, 1888, in Washburn, 45 miles east of Columbus. She follows them through two world wars, family upheavals, marriages, and offspring. Lily Scofield and Robert Butler -- Dew's tribute to her maternal grandfather, Kenyon Review founder John Crowe Ransom -- marry each other. The third member of the trio is Lily's first cousin Warren Scofield. He weds Agnes Claytor, a local woman 11 years younger, who becomes the linchpin of all three books.

Being Polite to Hitler picks up the Scofield story in 1953, in an industrious post-war America "glisten[ing] with well-being" yet shadowed by "an unacknowledged dread and anticipation of some sort of retribution for having perpetrated an act of aggression previously unmatched by any other country." Spanning 20 years of momentous change in American society, including the Cold War, the space race, and the Civil Rights movement, it takes its peculiar title from Agnes' daughter-in-law's exasperation with people not speaking up for principles but instead clinging to propriety and etiquette, ever in danger of failing to distinguish "those rare occasions when it was, in fact, Hitler to whom you were extending such instinctive courtesy, and therefore it was time, at last, to abandon any niceties at all."

At 54, Agnes, long widowed and long working as an uncomfortable third grade teacher, is "bottomed-out" -- tired beyond her years -- and ready to stop deferring politely to anyone. When her younger, almost too-good-to-be-true friend, Sam Holloway, asks her to marry him, she decides to ignore her grown children's objections. "It was about reclaiming and slaking her own desires after the long years of their being defined by the people to and for whom she felt responsible…she had become indifferent to anyone else's opinion of her. Well, not indifferent, but disengaged in the effort to sway them to view her favorably."

Dew's prose is unrushed, and occasionally marred by too much telling and not enough showing, as teachers like Agnes might say. But there are also lovely passages that capture the tone of small-town life in less hectic times: "The crackling, dry hot air of Washburn smelled like freshly ironed shirts, and Agnes felt as though she were being turned to Melba Toast in a slow oven. Any curiosity, any energy or animation, had evaporated, leaving behind only a flat, dry, gingerbread man of herself."

Like Anne Tyler, Dew makes the case that there's no such thing as an ordinary person. She occasionally strains all-too-visibly to broaden her narrative, resulting in some jarring shifts to follow the life of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun in Alabama. Her characters, meanwhile, strive more convincingly to reconcile their ongoing pursuit of happiness and their optimism on a personal level with what they gradually come to recognize as a bleak universal picture. This, it turns out, is the real rub between the profound and the mundane, and one of life's great challenges.

--Heller McAlpin